Introducing FOSS Factory — a Bounty System for GNU Hurd Work

gnu.org

14 points·Tsiolkovsky··6 comments

Be wary that in many cases, paying money actually _reduces_ effort, especially when the money is small. I'd hate to see a FOSS project slowed down because people started thinking "I'm only making $1 an hour on this" rather than thinking about how they are contributing to a meaningful project and their own experience.

One summary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect

Yeah, something tells me money isn't what's slowing Hurd down. Isn't Hurd even more irrelevant given the rise of virtualization?

It's similar to the likes of elance, or oDesk - sites that commoditize IT skills with ill-paid, mal-specified projects to the point where you'd be better off working at KFC. Maybe someday someone will get this right - I suspect that will require a lot more granularity in the specs.

I get a headache just thinking about all the wasted effort in the open source community. There's already a world class open source kernel. It has 1% of the desktop market. Let's build another kernel? I listened to a Linux podcast for all of 3 episodes and all they did was rip on Apple and talk about how much better they were. I've used Open Office for years but it's nowhere as good as Office.

Yes, there are some great projects but so much more could be done if people made a concerted effort.

One size doesn't fit all. Linux has its limitations, so sometimes HURD or Plan 9 could be a better choice. But choice requires understanding the differences, abilities and limitations.

It's just that if things work and look nice, nobody cares about their internal architecture. For most users, kernel is just a black box with pretty obscure meaning - if they know that there's such thing as kernel.

GNU Hurd... woah. When did it come back from being (almost) dead?

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