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Re: FOSS and development philosophy; was "Linux O_NONBLOCK bug/ quirk"

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crankypuss <crankypuss@nomail.invalid> writes:
> On 04/04/2014 09:46 AM, Rainer Weikusat wrote:
>> <snip> During the same time, a bunch of people
>> who are about my age or only a little older on average have become
>> 'insanely rich' (by my modest standards) despite giving all their code
>> away 'for free' under GPL and that's - frankly - not because they're so
>> immensely 'talented' while I'm so completely hopeless  <snip>
>
> I can see how that might be somewhat confusing, but are these people
> working "freelance", or are they employed by some company like RedHat,
> Oracle, etc?

Why would this be confusing? 'Linux' is basically a global research
project focussed on creating something of practical value instead of
'exploring interesting new theories' (which ultimatively end up as
roboters playing with toy bricks) and the people who do 'Linux' get paid
for their ongoing work even insofar they're freelancers. And research
works best in an environment were are freely shared and freely
reusable because this enables others to build something new based on
what is already available relatively quickly instead of keeping to start
on square one and reinvent everything all over again (and make all the
same mistakes again).

It also doubles as effective 'academic recruitment process' which weeds
out the totally incompetent, socially absolutely intolerable, too
dishonest to be considered anything but crooks etc etc. What remains is
a large pool of averagely skilled and knowledgable developers who are
not so sociopathic that they cannot ever work in a team, not so shady
that one has to expect them running away with all the cash at the
earliest possible opportunity and not so lazy that they frown upon the idea
of working in general. One can argue that this process is somewhat more
geared towards 'frat boys running the show for benefit of other frat
boys' than would be objectively sensible, ie, women are seriously
underrepresented because they usually don't engage in all the
outlaying 'mannish boy' rites and thus, never appear on the radar in the
inner circle, but by-and-large, it works.

NB: This text was written in text mode which means without access to
online dictionaries or search engines. It doubtlessly contains quite a
few linguistic lapses because of that.

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FOSS and development philosophy; was "Linux O_NONBLOCK bug/ quirk" crankypuss <crankypuss@nomail.invalid> - 2014-03-29 05:17 -0600
  Re: FOSS and development philosophy; was "Linux O_NONBLOCK bug/ quirk" crankypuss <crankypuss@nomail.invalid> - 2014-04-02 04:11 -0600
    Re: FOSS and development philosophy; was "Linux O_NONBLOCK bug/ quirk" Rainer Weikusat <rweikusat@mobileactivedefense.com> - 2014-04-02 12:57 +0100
      Re: FOSS and development philosophy; was "Linux O_NONBLOCK bug/ quirk" crankypuss <crankypuss@nomail.invalid> - 2014-04-03 03:15 -0600
        Re: FOSS and development philosophy; was "Linux O_NONBLOCK bug/ quirk" Rainer Weikusat <rweikusat@mobileactivedefense.com> - 2014-04-04 16:46 +0100
          Re: FOSS and development philosophy; was "Linux O_NONBLOCK bug/ quirk" crankypuss <crankypuss@nomail.invalid> - 2014-04-05 04:10 -0600
            Re: FOSS and development philosophy; was "Linux O_NONBLOCK bug/ quirk" Rainer Weikusat <rweikusat@mobileactivedefense.com> - 2014-04-05 15:53 +0100
              Re: FOSS and development philosophy; was "Linux O_NONBLOCK bug/ quirk" crankypuss <crankypuss@nomail.invalid> - 2014-04-06 03:21 -0600

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