Re: Funding GPL projects or funding the GPL?

[Bill Davidsen]

On Thu, 1 Aug 2002, David Schwartz wrote:

> 
> 
> On Wed, 31 Jul 2002 16:03:59 -0400 (EDT), Bill Davidsen wrote:
> 
> >This is totally unrelated to the ecconomic model, we have many proofs that
> >code quality is unrelated to financial compensation. People write crap
> >code for both fun and profit. So what you say is totally true, but has
> >zero to do with why the author wrote the code. You have to QA any code
> >before using it, why the developer wrote it is irrelevant.
> 
> 	No matter how many proofs you have or how good they are, I won't believe it 
> because this fails the giggle test. Here's a simple counter-proof. I want to 
> write an SQL server from scratch. I create two teams, one with $50,000 and 
> one with $5,000,000. You can honestly tell me that it's equally like that 
> either team will produce a higher quality SQL server?

First, we were talking about written for free vs. written to make money.
Second, the quality of the output depends on the quality of the process,
not how much you pay for it. Equally likely isn't what I said, either.

One last time: commercial software is not a guaranty of quality nor is
being free an indication of being shoddy. Clearly if you underpay people
for any work you are likely to get poor work, but that doesn't apply to
someone who is being paid in satisfaction and recognition, and who has a
real motivation to do it to the best of her/his ability. 
 
> 	This reminds me of the proofs that supposedly showed that locking up 
> convicted criminals for longer didn't lower the crime rate. Are we honestly 
> supposed to believe that otherwise honest people commit more crimes to make 
> up the difference?

Glad it reminds you, I sure as hell don't see the point... and I never saw
any such thing. Studies show that locking people up longer doesn't make
*that person* less likely to commit a crime, which is not at all the same
thing as the crime rate in crimes per unit time by all persons.

-- 
bill davidsen <[e-mail]>
  CTO, TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.