"ask Mako": doing just that

[John]

Benj. Mako Hill wrote:
> <quote who="Michael Shigorin" date="Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 06:48:26PM +0300">
> 
>>On Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 04:33:24PM +0100, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
>>
>>>Mixing  funding  with  volunteer  work raises all sorts of
>>>issues. Ask Mako to tell you about the experiment that showed
>>>that this difficulty might   be   hard-wired  into  our  genes
>>>-  there  are  deep  social difficulties  with  projects  that
>>>blend  full  time  paid  work with volunteer efforts.
>>
>>I'd like to accept this proposal and ask Benjamin -- what it was?
>>(if the answer's better personal, so be it; although I doubt that)
> 
> 
> About six months ago, I wrote up a piece on funding volunteer free
> software projects that is being alluded to here:
> 
>   http://mako.cc/writing/funding_volunteers/funding_volunteers.html
> 
> In particular, there was some academic work on mixing volunteerism and
> commercial work that I cited in that paper. If you can't get access to
> the documents or journal articles I cited off list and you really want
> to read them, please contact me offlist and I can try to get you
> copies.

An example of paid labour which you didn't mention is the Linux kernel 
where some corporations pay workers to work on components, mostly 
drivers, of particular interest to the organisation. Examples are 
Adaptec which pays someone to develop/maintain drivers for its SCSI 
cards, and SiS. And IBM which has part of its development lab in .de 
supporting zSeries-specific components of the kernel and (I think) gcc.

Presumambly too Apple is putting into gcc, but I'll leave that as a 
research topic.

It seems to me the essential point is that these people have a 
particular interest, and in some sense it's their employer who's 
volunteering.


A free software product where volunteerism is not working, so far as I 
can tell, is sql-ledger. The "lead developer" is (apparently making his 
living by supplying (paid-for) documentation and support, and while 
there's a lot of discussion on the list (or was when I was interested in 
it), there did not seem to me to be a lot of code input from others.