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A profitable Linux Desktop distro?A profitable Linux Desktop distro?Posted Nov 19, 2008 22:48 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)In reply to: A profitable Linux Desktop distro? by dlang Parent article: Mandriva reports its 3rd Quarter results
Time is money isn't it?
A volunteer contributor's time is a valuable resource isn't it? Something worth cultivating, something worth making use of? How valuable is it for any project? If we tried to account for all that time and turned it into an in-kind expenditure report.. what would that number look like? If a business had to pay someone for all the work their community volunteers do..how big a number would that be? How is all that community effort not an investment worthy of responsible status reporting?
And why do you insist on using the word "Ubuntu" where the word "Canonical" makes more sense?
-jef
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A profitable Linux Desktop distro? Posted Nov 19, 2008 23:20 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
there is not a single origination in the world that accounts for volunteer hours and turn them into expense reports. it's just not worth the effort.
as for typing "Ubuntu" instead of "Canonical", it's shorter and close enough to the same meaning
A profitable Linux Desktop distro? Posted Nov 19, 2008 23:47 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
I think you are wrong. I think there are a number of examples of incorporated organizations which make it a habit of documenting the financial worth of in-kind contributions of all sorts...including time.
Typically those sorts of organizations which make significant use of volunteers are non-profit...and there are compelling tax based incentives to want to make sure that sort of in-kind contribution of services is documented. And generally speaking there are reporting requirements for non-profits. Now of course, the rules of of in-kind contribution reporting are squishy.. but efforts are made to account for it when its deemed appropriate.
What we are seeing now in open source project management... is a pretty new model in how private business rely on a large volunteer contributor base. There are no established baseline rules for this sort of thing as to what is expected. Up till now for-profit business entities have typically been expected to deal with labor, investors and consumers....not a large contributor pool who are both a significant portion of your labor and also your consumers. We simply don't know what the best practise rules are. How do we know if the managing entity is taking advantage of their contributor base? We've no baseline standard of performance when it comes to expectations on business and contributor relations. Time to unionize.
-jef
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