<div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 4:11 AM, Hilaire Fernandes <<a href="mailto:hilaire@ofset.org">hilaire@ofset.org</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
tim Rowledge a écrit :<div class="Ih2E3d"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8x;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
On 4-Apr-08, at 8:49 PM, Klaus D. Witzel wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8x;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
It seems to me that the board has a problem here, with both 3.9 and 3.10 :(</blockquote>
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....</blockquote>
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I found this statement pretty irresponsible :(<br>
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).<br><font color="#888888">
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Hilaire<br></font></blockquote><div> </div></div>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.<div>
<br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>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.<div>
<br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>- Stephen</div></div>