On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 8:39 AM, Debayan Banerjee <debaya...@gmail.com> wrote: >
> People who participate in programming contest arenas spend a lot of time > getting accustomed to the arena rules and keep practicing whenever they are > free. These arenas have a ranking schemes which require consistent > performance. If you are a student, you generally choose what you want to do > with your free time. > Why dont these people choose to contribute to free software instead? The > biggest reason is the learning curve. Going through the process of > interacting with developers online, making sure that a particular feature is > indeed required and then going to work on it. > I remember Vignesh, my college friend, deciding to get a patch upstream. It > took him many months to get a sorting bug fixed with a few lines of code (I > think). > For the coder who spends his day writing O(log n) code to lookup n-ary trees > in limited time in programming contest arenas, looking for similar > issues/challenges of similar level in real world projects requires an insane > amount of time investment and also a lot of luck > Hence, from what I have seen is that the really good programmers who are > hooked onto the contest scene never look back at anything else. They just > keep going. > Can these people be converted to contribute to Free Software? Sure. We need > to ask them one question: What is your code being used for? Is it doing > anyone except you any good? > That may be the only way to convert the best of the lot. After that active > mentoring and hand holding for a little while is desirable. > There are FOSS projects, which are modular enough to be used in setting up contest goals. A relatively gradual process can therefore be used for such people. Best A. Mani -- A. Mani ASL, CLC, AMS, CMS http://www.logicamani.co.cc _______________________________________________ india mailing list india@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/india