Re: Funding GPL projects or funding the GPL?

[David Schwartz]

On Thu, 1 Aug 2002 12:51:16 -0400 (EDT), Gerhard Mack wrote:

>I don't get it.. he should know full well there are programmres out
>there who will not provide good code no mater how much you pay them.

	Sure, and there are people who can't write a symphony no matter how much you 
pay them. But, believe it or not, the people who can write symphonies are 
more likely to get paid to write them than people who aren't. Or, in other 
words, there will tend to be a strong correlation between how much a person 
is paid to write symphonies and how well he or she writes them. This is 
because in general the people who control the flow of money tend to pay the 
people who write the symphonies that meet their needs.

	Now if you do a study where you randomly choose 100 people and pay them an 
extra $500 to write symphonies, you are very unlikely to get improved 
symphonies. But this hardly shows that more money won't make better 
symphonies.

	For an individual given programmer, in most cases code quality won't 
correspond to financial compensation. You can't pay a randomly selected 
person more and more money and find them writing better and better 
symphonies. However, if I had to get a symphony written by any means at my 
disposal, the more money I had, the better the symphony would be.

	DS