On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 4:11 AM, Hilaire Fernandes <hilaire at ofset.org> wrote:

> tim Rowledge a écrit :
> >
> > On 4-Apr-08, at 8:49 PM, Klaus D. Witzel wrote:
> > >
> > > It seems to me that the board has a problem here, with both 3.9 and
> > > 3.10 :(
> >
> > Well, no. It's not the board that has any sort of problem; the board is
> > a bunch of people that meet every couple of weeks to discuss an agenda that
> > is primarily organisation based (ie getting to a state where we can join the
> > SFLC foudation thingy). The board is not a team that can be asked or
> > expected to solve all *our* problems. *You lot* get to do the actual work.
> > Until and unless you provide funds to pay a team....
>
> I found this statement pretty irresponsible :(
> And reading this statement one may think what is the Sqf good for (beside
> the never ending registration in SFLC...) and outsiders may even fell that
> Squeak community is not a good place to go (no clear roadmap).
>
> Hilaire
>

I think you're overstating things a bit.  The point is that unless you are
willing to jump in and help, or provide other means of help (i.e. funding),
one shouldn't complain about the state of affairs.  The people doing this
work are doing it as a free service to others and for that, we should be
grateful.
At the same time, maybe we should be thinking about alternative means of
funding.  The way I see it, funding is a means of enabling more people to
spend more of their time working on squeak (presumably something they
enjoy).  I think the bounty model doesn't work all that well, and I think
being dependent on benevolent commercial ventures to develop and donate
substantial code is also sub-optimal.  With commercial ventures, their
attention is always going to be focused on their product.  Innovating and
developing the core squeak system will consequently only get their attention
when it is necessary to further the commercial product.  And then, they will
only develop it as far as it needs to go to serve their interests and no
further.  I find it a real shame that the economy around core platforms and
tools seems to have evaporated with the open source movement.  It seems that
there is precious little funding available to those that want to develop new
languages, new operating systems, new development tools and the like.  There
is a modest amount of innovation going on in spite of this reality, but
progress is frustratingly slow.
Here's an idea for a funding model.  Instead of always releasing new stuff
immediately under MIT, how about releasing some stuff under a time limited
proprietary license with a specific date at which it reverts to MIT (this
would be baked into the original license such that the "freedom date"
is irrevocable).  The date could be 3 months, 6 months or even a year or two
into the future.  In the interim, anyone wishing to use that software would
need to pay some fee to the author(s).  This is the essentially the same
idea that is behind copyright laws, but on a dramatically shorter timeframe
that is more appropriate for software (the life of copy rights in the US
extends for life+70 years I believe, which certainly doesn't work for
software).  If we could make something like this work successfully (and I'd
say that success means that more people are able to spend more of their time
working on squeak (instead of other endeavors to pay the bills)), I think
people would quickly take notice.  Imagine if this came to be an expectation
of all software licenses.  Imagine if all commercial software were sold like
this.

To me, this is more in line with basic economics.  The cost to produce
software is substantial, but the marginal cost to distribute software is
effectively zero.  So, over time the price of software (or any intellectual
property) must approach zero.  It's unnatural for software to be locked up
under proprietary licenses for what is effectively an indefinite period of
time.  It's also unnatural in my opinion to rely solely on indirect means of
funding (relying on people deriving inherent fun in the work or commercial
benevolence or services associated with the free software, etc).  Musicians
will deal with this by deriving money from live performances or associated
merchandising and hence be able to offer recordings for free right from the
start.  I doubt too many people will pay to watch many of us as we write
code, so we have to think of alternative means.

Maybe if enough people were willing to pay $10 for a high quality 3.10, it
would be enough to entice a few people into spending a larger chunk of their
time working on that problem.  The compromise we make is that for the first
6 months (or whatever the author decides), it's not free software...you must
pay $10.  The small size of the squeak community won't make people rich in
so doing, but over time, a better squeak means a larger community and a
larger community means that more people will have an opportunity to
participate as a supplier in such an economy.

- Stephen
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