A bit cheap? [LWN.net]

A bit cheap?

Posted Jan 18, 2005 23:41 UTC (Tue) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]

Isn't a $1,000 a lot of money to receive for volunteer work on completely Free/Open software? ;-)

Last I checked, most the folks that did the web designs for the other hundreds of thousands of Open Source web sites out there didn't get crap in pay.

I could understand $1,000 being cheap if, say, Red Hat or Novell were asking for a redesign of their whole sites (including all the non-Open bits like RHN or the various Novell proprietary products) but $1,000 is a lot from something like Canonical, who's site is about as Open and community driven as you can get.

A bit cheap?

Posted Jan 19, 2005 0:30 UTC (Wed) by Zenith (guest, #24899) [Link] (4 responses)

Just to put things into perspective, the citation below is from the Gentoo redesign contest:
<blockquote>The submitter of the winning design will have the opportunity to place a link at the bottom of every page that says "Design provided by <your name>" and links to a web page of your choosing. (We reserve the right to change or remove the link if it points to objectionable content, such as a porn site). The right to display this link is contingent on the submitter actually completing the design as described above.</blockquote>
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/infrastructure/redesign-gui...

So, as I feel Ubuntu and Gentoo are serving many of the same purposes and have equal claims to being open and free, I can't see why you would think that $1,000 is cheap.

But again, that's just me :-)

Also, I haven't seen any (?) other distributions having a bounty-page that lets you earn money on doing what you (most likely) like: http://www.ubuntulinux.org/community/bounties
Quote: " The 2004 budget for bounties is USD 100,000. We also use donated funds to contribute to the bounty fund."

Cheap? I think not :-)

A bit cheap?

Posted Jan 19, 2005 9:10 UTC (Wed) by alextingle (guest, #20593) [Link] (3 responses)

Hmm. Canonical is a well-funded commercial company. Ubuntu is their product. Do they pay their developers a tenth of the normal salary for their job?

I understand your points, and perhaps there should be a sliding scale between commercial and community. After all, Canonical are giving away their product for free. But they're definitely not as community centred as (say) Debian - if Debian offered $1000 to redesign their website I'd say it was too much.

A bit cheap?

Posted Jan 19, 2005 14:22 UTC (Wed) by allesfresser (guest, #216) [Link]

If the price is too low for you, then don't participate. To some people $1000 is still a nice chunk of change.

A bit cheap?

Posted Jan 19, 2005 20:47 UTC (Wed) by Zenith (guest, #24899) [Link]

I understand what you're saying, but you are more than welcome to take their distro and use it for free, unrestricted. That goes a long way in buying confidence from me :)

Also, it's not like they're asking you to do the entire makeover yourself. Sketches/mockups are more than sufficient, they actually explicitly state that they are NOT expecting complete and functional proposals.

Spend a day or so sketching and earn yourself $1000, sounds like a deal to me....

But yes, Ubuntu and Debian are not the same, but that does not mean that I'm not interested in helping both, though.

A bit cheap?

Posted Jan 20, 2005 13:59 UTC (Thu) by XERC (guest, #14626) [Link]

When ever there are limited resources, there must
be prioritys. The work that is done on Debian
is so vast and labourous that offering any chunk for
a smaller job at the same time when greater
jobs get done "without the beer", woud be a
little bit socially destructive.

I'ts just a subjective guess, I'm not representing
anyone and I'm not a Debian developer either.
(I love Debian, I use Debian, I ...Debian).

A bit cheap?

Posted Jan 20, 2005 0:16 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

Isn't $0 a bit cheap for a complete GNU/Linux distribution?