[PD] The economics of Open source

Charles Henry czhenry at gmail.com
Tue Mar 22 23:27:46 CET 2011


I thought I'd pose a question to you, for academic curiosity.  For example,
in my current line of work, cluster computing, there's a lot of possible
funding models for supporting maintenance, and they all have different
~unintended consequences.  (ex) You lose customers, waste cycles, delay
research schedules, and they all have some other costs associated.
Economics just works that way.

But in general, I wonder what produces the best outcomes for software
development.  It's an impossible question to answer without having much time
to waste, so don't try too hard :)

Could a open-source project with a funding model lead to better code than a
professional solution?

Could you just dangle some cash on the end of a string and the cats will
just herd themselves?

On Sat, Mar 19, 2011 at 2:34 PM, Mathieu Bouchard <matju at artengine.ca>wrote:

> On Sat, 19 Mar 2011, Bernardo Barros wrote:
>
>  Hello , Mathieu! Well, I did not refer to implementation of new features,
>> but the maintenance of that code that already works, fixing bugs.
>>
>
> Ok, so, basically, buggy software gets rewarded for requests to fix bugs.
> Bugless software is not rewarded : it does not pay. Therefore we are
> encouraged to put enough bugs in there so that we get money. Nevermind the
> high-reliability ideals.
>
> (Of course, don't let my comments prevent you from contributing money. I'm
> just trying to say that some assumptions about funding may encourage the
> wrong things and cause strange compensations.)
>
>
>  _______________________________________________________________________
> | Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
>
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