Re: Funding GPL projects or funding the GPL?

[Federico Ferreres <fferreres@ojf.com>]

On Sat, 2002-07-27 at 03:29, Alexander Viro wrote:
> Sigh...  That stops working at the same point where pyramid does - when
> number of recepients becomes a sufficiently large fraction of all potential
> participants.  It is not sustainable.

I forgot to answer that one. It doesn't matter how many people want to
join a project. It's up to the copyright owners to decide how much stuff
they need, who to "work with", "how much folks are needed" and how is
the line of comand structured. At some point, contributors will have to
send free patches as they are doing now. That may or may not earn them
into the "core team".

Users will decide how much money to put in such projects. If not enough
funds are pointed in your direction (based on how much the developer
requested), you'll just have to do with less (which is better than
nothing). And the asked funds will probably make sense, because if they
don't there will be an incentive to branchthe project (except for the
core apps as already pointed out).

In the Debian scheme, people can't choose where the money goes, and
there's no strict limit to the number of developers, and it's not a big
enough user base (though big). As you point out, the ships sinks, as
it's a classical example of the Fishermen dylema: the more you capture,
the better of you are off, but you can't prevents others from doing the
same. After some time there's so much fishermen that nobody capture
enough to make a living from it. 

And that's why fGPL should allow people to choose their funded projects
(except the core systems) and why lead developers should be able to
manage the funds as they see fit.

Federico