[Arm-netbook] The Libre Guild of Program Changers [Formerly "Re: Standards Organization as a Potentially Universal Free/Libre Software Developement Sustenance Model:

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Tue, Sep 5, 2017 at 6:53 PM, Philip Hands <phil at hands.com> wrote:

> Great care needs to be taken when considering paying people to do things
> that they might otherwise do for the love of it.
>
> If you introduce a monetary incentive, and the work is then done by
> people who's primary motive is money, then while the volume of
> contributions might well go up, the quality could plummet.

 can and has.  thanks for raising this point, phil.  there are a
number of projects where this has genuinely happened.  the primary one
i recall is the KDE4 project, which received a $EUR 10m EU Grant
about... 10(?) years ago.

 they implemented a look-alike copy of *the* worst and most hated
version of Windows that has ever been created: WIndows Vista.

 look also at what happens with redhat.  the employees of many of the
projects dominated by redhat basically rush ahead "coding without
thought for the consequences".

 it seems to be the [extremely general, brush-sweeping] case that
there is a certain limted-per-time-unit amount of "creativity" - i.e.
retrospective and reflective thought - that any one individual is
capable of.

 if you *compress time* in which they *act* on those thoughts - for
example by paying them money to work on something - then you are
genuinely, genuinely in danger of doing two things:

 (1) decreasing the "number of reflective thoughts per unit of actual
OUTPUT per hour"

 (2) decreasing their energy and capacity to HAVE "reflective thoughts
per unit of time"

there are some really famous cases of people doing all the thinking
first, followed by doing 100% of typing non-stop, second.  these
include bram cohen (creator of bittorrent) and dr richard stallman
(famously known for overloading, filling and having to wait for the
keyboard buffer of the terminal on which he was typing source code,
straight from his head without ever having written a single word of it
down on paper or keyboard before beginning)

these people are exceptions.  for pretty much everyone else, actually
receiving money and using it to work *full time* on a project is a
disaster.

so my advice would be - if anyone's asking - if you _are_ looking to
fund someone, make sure that they're doing it on a non-full-time
basis, or at least look for _some_ sort of sign that there is at least
a huge amount of thought and planning gone into what they are asking
you to back.

l.