[quote=“Joe Tennies”]One method that has worked is to set a bounty for open sourcing it. This tended to be bigger projects though (Mozilla and Blender come to mind)
Unfortunately, no nation’s economy has figured out how to properly
compensate or encourage open source contributions.
So this is what i think.
The true measure of one’s software skills is in having one’s work widely accepted by the community of users.
Wrong. Software is complex. More complex than anything people make likely, like Linux with all the software written in it, is likely the most complex artificially made system on Earth. So rarely is its value estimated by analyzing the code itself. Thus the primary are indirect ways of estimating the value. These can be someone’s opinions, or how by someone’s understanding the software will benefit one or another field of life. Which can be extremely subjective, like someone’s opinion may depend on someone’s interests, which may not be the benefits of the users of the software at all. Thus software development is a rare field, where the benefit you get may not depend on the quality of what you do. Means it’s not that when you do a good work, you get a good award, like when a carpenter makes a good furniture, everyone sees that it’s a good furniture, and has a value. Very different when making software. And users, because the software is complex, often don’t even try to use the software before they get confirmation by the people they consider competent, that the software is good, these are most often not the other users. The users are also mostly not competent in the matters related to the developed software, because many of them use the first time that kind of software, and thus in spite they may have a good experience in using other types of software, they have almost no knowledge about that particular software.
I also received thousands of dollars worth of hardware for free to enable me to write FOSS to work with said hardware.
Yes, someone buy me a high DPI monitor. Because i have a long time a pull request, for changes in my kiss_sdl widget toolkit for high DPI monitors. But i cannot accept it, as i cannot test it, because i have no high DPI monitor. I know others can test it, but i cannot accept it in my code when i cannot test it myself.
But perhaps of most importance to those like the OP is that many companies
these days prefer to hire those who’ve done successful FOSS. If you’re good at
it, the doors are wide open in the job market.
Very wrong. I talked to one IT manager (Finnish), the software they developed in his company, required certain features that needed a lot of development, and they had no experience in his company in that field. I knew there were open source developers, who had participated in development of some very popular and widely used software, were very competent in that field, and were willing to work for pay, at that much cheaper than his company currently paid for the development. I suggested him to hire one of these open source developers, but he said that he will not do that because open source developers cannot be controlled. So not only doesn’t open source development help one to get job, but it evidently lowers ones chances to get job. When anyone gets to know that you do open source development, that is, but when you are a developer, you cannot easily hide what you have done, especially when you have done a lot of open source development.
This doesn’t mean that i say that doing open source development doesn’t give any benefits at all, i only say that in my opinion your arguments of what are the benefits, are wrong, and open source development may not give any personal benefits whatsoever, or may be harmful to a person due to a lot of time and effort spent for that, and a lot of skills acquired that give no benefit at all in ones personal life. Some of the skills that require almost a lifetime to learn. To the extent that this may kill an individual, and most likely there are such cases too, though no one of course talks about them. Thus open source development can kill people. Again, i don’t exclude that for some open source development may give personal benefit, i only say how i think it is in general.
But again, why that paradigm, open source or commercial, why does it have to be so extreme, why only that must be considered right, and nothing else. What about a license that says that the source will be made open after 5 years, or then yes, will be made open after a certain amount of money has been received. Why these shouldn’t be the options at all?On Sun, Sep 25, 2016 at 2:12 PM, j_post <j_post at pacbell.net (j_post at pacbell.net)> wrote:
On Sunday 25 September 2016 09:34:15 Jonathan Dearborn wrote:
kiss_sdl - Simple generic GUI widget toolkit for SDL2 https://github.com/actsl/kiss_sdl