Funding An Individual BSD Developer 141
PuceBaboon writes "Poul-Henning Kamp,a committed FreeBSD developer (the
main contributor to
"jails", one of my
favourite features) has lost his main
contract and is
appealing for funding to enable him to work
on FreeBSD exclusively for the rest of the year."
Re:He wants HOW much? (Score:5, Insightful)
He still has to pay taxes, you know...
It may be where his budget balances, but if he expects to live off the kindness of strangers, he needs to adjust his budget substantially.
He's not *expecting* anything. This is an experiment: See if the FreeBSD community is willing to pay for someone to work full-time on FreeBSD. If not, well, he finds more contract work, earns the same amount (or more), and works on FreeBSD in his spare time.
Re:He wants HOW much? (Score:5, Insightful)
For my 2/3 tax, I get healthcare and there are no "pre-existing conditions" or HMOs to deal with.
It's a bit hard to explain to americans, but healthcare is simply not a thing I have to consider in relation to my employment.
I also get education, including college, for my kids.
I don't have to fear the pan-handlers, insane and other strays because we actually have a social care system that works.
And don't even get me started about guns, bureaucrazy, corruption and the oppresive regime controlled by big business.
I've lived in San Francisco. My son is born there.
I don't miss any of those things.
What I get by paying the same amount you do, is peace of mind.
Priceless!
Re:He wants HOW much? (Score:2, Insightful)
Two quick observations. First, if you are carrying a $415k mortgage on a salary / wage of less than $5500.00 a month you either a) have no kids or b) have a really odd sense of how interest rates work.
"He's got some enormous cojones asking people to give him what amounts to $66,000
Not really. Poul-Henning Kamp is one of those individuals working on FreeBSD that should in no way feel bad for trying to balance time on a great open source project with family needs. He has the skills. It seems to me that this is a creative solution to help keep excellent developers on projects as they get older, have kids, mortgages, car payments etc etc.
Posting as AC
Re:Not asking for much... (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed.
I work for a firm with at least 50 FreeBSD boxes. After the recent tcp advisory the boss cant stop with semi-serious offensive comments about the BSD community. I'm now trying to get him to realise that the weight of his complaints are directly proportional to what he's contributed to FreeBSD... i.e. nothing.
Now if there was some way to allow him to pay money into FreeBSD... and have a say... I'm sure he'd go for it. I mean he pays for an MS TechNet subscription and all that seems to get him is a few CDs every month. Hell, this would be in addition to the ongoing FreeBSD development, so there would be a net gain.
Re:Not asking for much... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Not asking for much... (Score:3, Insightful)
Any amount of administration needs somebody to do that, if you administer money, some tax-entity will want to know about it and will want you to do it according to a set of rules, and quite likely, want you to pay tax on it too.
As I wrote in my solicitation, I wish the foundation could have handled this, but they did not have the resources to deal with it, mostly, and that is the interesting bit: lack of time.
It will take some time before OSS projects like FreeBSD has the necessary infrastructure to deal with a systematic user-payment model. Until then we'll just have to do what we can, while we remember:
T.T.T
Put up in a place
where it's easy to see
the cryptic admonishment
T.T.T.
When you feel how depressingly
slowly you climb,
it's well to remember that
Things Take Time.
-- Piet Hein
donate a bit! (Score:4, Insightful)
Such a Deal! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:He wants HOW much? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know about Denmark, but have you actually been to, say, Paris or Amsterdam or Barcelona? They're a lot more multicultural than pretty much any city in the US except maybe New York and one or two others (and on the whole much less ghettoised than New York). Smaller towns in Europe are comparatively homogeneous, but no more so than mid-western American towns.
Re:I/O out from under Giant lock (Score:3, Insightful)
Yahoo! got started on FreeBSD and now the news is they are having record profits. Where's the Yahoo! funding? Where's the Apple funding? Where's the corporate funding at all?
Re:Is it me or does this guy sound a touch arrogan (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:He wants HOW much? (Score:3, Insightful)
"There ain't no such thing as a free lunch."
If you're paying taxes to get your education, then it's not really "free," now is it?
That's like a car salesman showing you a $20,000 car and saying "Give me $20,000 and you can have this new car for free!" It's a dumb way of looking at trade.
and a practically non-corrupt political system.
One of the things that has been fairly-consistent about statist nations is that after the veil of communism/socialism has been lifted (e.g. after the fall of the Berlin Wall and communism), it's often found that the government beneath that statist veil was quite corrupt. Russia is a perfect example, and it remains as corrupt as ever; China and North Korea too, are prime examples. And Tony Blair doesn't seem too popular among Brits these days, having played along with the Bush II corruption in Iraq.
Not that the U.S. doesn't have its share of corrupt officials -- we have plenty of them -- but at least we *generally* know who is corrupt and who isn't. For example, the former Senator Fritz Hollings was bought off by the MPAA and RIAA (remember the "Fritz chip" that was to be in everybody's computer as mandated by legislation?) - and now he's out of the Senate. Now if only we can do that with President Bush...
Point is, don't buy so much into a nation's horse-and-pony show if you don't have complete and absolute transparency of your government. I wish Americans would take that advice w.r.t. the closed-door dealings we have in Congress occasionally (for "national security," of course *rolls eyes*) and work harder to open them up...
Great work on FreeBSD 5.x BTW.
(I'll admit though, that if you pay 2/3 of your salary to taxes, that you're getting a better deal than us Americans. We pay roughly 50% of our salary in taxes (i.e. we are now 50% socialist), and we don't get subsidized healthcare, university education, and so on. All we get is an oversized military that protects the U.S., Europe, and the rest of our allies, whee... (your taxes would be higher if you had to spend more on your military to protect your country from Russia, etc. You reap the rewards of the U.S.'s implicit protection of the entire Euro-area, including Denmark))
Re:Is it me or does this guy sound a touch arrogan (Score:4, Insightful)
Donors are paying him to work on FreeBSD.
He is to do satisfactory work on FreeBSD, and I don't see why he wouldn't - he's going to work on stuff he chooses, so I don't see why he would work on stuff he is crap at.
When you order the Chef's Special in a restaurant of some standing you're not expecting "soup of the day", the Chef usually produces something satisfactory, if not impressive.
Better than 3000 ignorant donors telling him what to do. Think 3000 PHBs.
Re:Is it me or does this guy sound a touch arrogan (Score:2, Insightful)
Perhaps people, who rated your post as "Interesting" could also join the conversation.
As some slashdotters pointed out, I am against free speech (because I've proposed to trash the trolls out of BSD section). Perhaps then all those pro-free-speech people, together with all those, who think phk sounds arrogant could reply right below this message.
If you know, how to do things the better way (and I am pretty sure you do; you wouldn't criticize then), please tell us. I am pretty sure we all are interested.