On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 23:49, Sven Burmeister <sven.burmeis...@gmx.net> wrote: >> Money introduces a dangerous dynamics into this. It values extrinsic rewards >> over intrinsic rewards, opens the can of worms of fair distribution of >> money, and it requires a new level of administration, which is hard to get >> right. > > Ok, so if the money you earn while coding for KDE is from a company that's not > dangerous. If you get money from google's summer of code (which is advertised > by KDE) it is not dangerous. If you collect money through donations – as > Sebastian did – it's not dangerous. But if you get a bounty for a bug fix it > becomes dangerous? How come? > > If one claims that bounties on features may lead to unmaintained code – why > still advertise GSoC? It does exactly that since years. On the other hand > there are lots of examples where features ended-up unmaintained without their > addition being paid for. So money is not the one cause and IMHO certainly not > the main cause – and KDE advertises projects that pay money for features – not > for a living but just some extra bugs.
We (as in the GSoC admin team and most of the mentors) are well aware of the dangers that GSoC potentially brings but the overall benefit is bigger than the risk. > And of course, bug fixing is something completely different. Most of the time > it alters some lines of code but does not add any feature to maintain. It > fixes rather than adds. And maintaining working code seems less work than > buggy code. > >> Doing free software because you love it works much better. Enjoy the >> technical challenges, enjoy being part of a wonderful community, enjoy the >> feeling of accomplishment, when you get something great done. This pays >> much better than money for fixing bugs. It pays in happiness, but it also >> pays materially. Successful involvement in free software projects is a >> booster for many carreers. This will put you into a situation where you can >> earn the serious money, and if you are a bit lucky even with something you >> really love. > > I mostly agree with you but it's simply a fact that there are issues in KDE > that "nobody" cares about about, loves, has time for or however you want to > call it. Issues that nobody enjoys fixing or nobody has time for fixing etc. > They get fixed if somebody feels like it and money can help to feel like doing > otherwise unsexy work. > > And I would also claim that those currently contributing do not suddenly turn > evil (I'm exaggerating) because they get some money for a bug fix. There won't > be hundreds of people just getting on the KDE train to earn money. (And even > if, every bug fixed is positive for KDE. Features might be different.) > > I would like to take a more positive approach. Those that contribute to KDE do > so because they want to, because they are able to and because they like to, > they decide which bugs and features to work on. Adding some money to that will > still leave it up to the people to decide what they want to work on and how to > share their money with their community. I'd like to recommend watching Stormy Peter's excellent talk titled "Would you do it again for free". It has some very enlightening points about this topic. > If your company pays you for development it might put up some goals, e.g. in > kdepim feature x/bug z to meet the demands of client y. Your work is directed > according to the company's goals. Users offering bounties try to give an > incentive for things that "cannot" be loved and thus stay unfixed for a long > time. If you accept the former you cannot abolish the latter. Especially when > it comes to bug fixing! What's so dangerous about giving incentives to > otherwise pretty unsexy work, i.e. bug fixing? It changes the game and the motivation change is not restricted to that work no-one else wants to do. I also don't believe the train of thought that we have a lot of areas that no-one wants to touch. Most of these areas lack from exposure to people who would love to work on them. That's the first thing we need to fix and the CWG has been working on that with Finding the Unloved but I am sure there is a lot more that can be done. Cheers Lydia -- Lydia Pintscher KDE Community Working Group member http://kde.org - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher >> Visit http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-devel#unsub to unsubscribe <<
