Re: Funding GPL projects or funding the GPL?

[Alexander Viro]

On Thu, 1 Aug 2002, David Schwartz wrote:

> 
> >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.
> 
> 	I give one person $2,000 and one person $50,000 to buy a car. Would you 
> argue that they are equally likely to come back with quality cars?

If you send both to area famous for seedy dealers?  Yeah - both will
come back with painted pieces of shit, unless they'll have uncommon
luck to find something better.  And that's a *BIG* luck.

	Face it - in a lot of categories the market of software is market
of snake oil.  When all alternatives on the market are utter crap and that
situation hadn't been changed in decades...  And I mean all - be they
commercial, free, for Linux, Solaris, Windows, VMS, HP-UX, yaddda, yadda;
it doesn't matter.

	It's nice to pretend that this is not the case.  Just don't forget
to pray when you view a PDF or PostScript document from some site.  Or
listen to mp3.  Or view a picture in one of $BIGNUM formats.

	And don't give me that crap about Sturgeon's Law - for many categories
we are talking about 100%, not 90%.  Sheesh...