OSI Announces Open Source Awards 162
JohnGrahamCumming writes "There's a story running on ZDNet about how OSI is going to be giving Open Source Awards with cash prizes of up to $10,000. The idea is to create the "Nobel Prizes" of Open Source. Announcement was made yesterday as OSCON with some big names backing the awards (e.g. Sun, OSAF and (interestingly) a major venture capital firm USVP)."
LETS LAY OFF MORE PEOPLE (Score:1, Insightful)
This OSS stuff has has done to software developers what MP3 has done to musicians. Eveybody is happy with the free stuff except the innovators who have to scrape by.
Dont fall into this trap, sponsered by greedy hardware companies that couldnt care less about paying for software.
Venture firm (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:About time (Score:1, Insightful)
It's nice that these awards are coming out, because maybe it will give someone a little more motivation to do what they were going to do anyway. But it's not going to produce more open source projects on its own, nor will it attract high quality money-motivated programmers, because if you're in it for the money, you're not going to be writing open source projects without a salary anyway.
Re:Hooray! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:About time (Score:2, Insightful)
Nobody deserves money for anything they produce unless they can and do sell it for money.
This view of production is quite naive. Alot of stuff is produced that is not sold, even though the producers get money for their work. An example is mathematicians that produce mathematical knowledge, and are paid for their work by grants and/or saleries. Most mathematics that are produced are certainly not gonna be "sold" in the near future, if ever.
Programmers that are just motivated by money are usually not high quality programmers. They tend to leave an unmaintainable buggy mess after themselves.
There are Open Source projects that have paid programmers. An example is the Norwegian company Systems In Motien (www.sim.no) that have the Open Source 3D API Coin3D (www.coin3d.org)
Re:Venture firm (Score:2, Insightful)