On Jan 23, 2004, at 4:43 PM, Ed Skinner wrote:

> On Friday 23 January 2004 15:42, Chris Gehlker wrote:
>> On Jan 23, 2004, at 9:43 AM, Phil Mattison wrote:
>>> I've been trying to understand the economic rationale behind the open
>>> source
>>> philosophy, and I think I see an apparent contradiction. From what
>>> I've seen
>>> so far it seems there are two economic motives for contributing to 
>>> open
>>> source projects. (Ignoring those who do it just for fun.)
>>
>> The reality is that the best programmers, like the best artists and
>> athletes, are going to practice their art regardless of what they get
>> paid. Of course they want to be paid fortunes but it doesn't really
>> make them more productive.
>
>      Not so.
>      Full-time paid programmers turn out more code than someone who 
> does it
> non-professionally simply because of the hours that can be dedicated 
> to the
> task. If I work 40+ hours at a non-programming job, I simply won't 
> have the
> time (or energy) to write as much code as someone who does 40+ hours 
> writing
> code.

Even were I to concede that that were true, lines of code are a lousy 
metric for how much a programming effort matters. Only elegant lines 
count. The thousands of VB programmers inside enterprises produce 
million of lines a year. These people are programmers simply because it 
is the best paying legal job they can get. When their jobs move 
offshore, they will do something else.

In contrast the Ruby programming language is a few thousand lines; 
every one contributed by open source hackers as an act of love. Yet I 
would certainly argue that the Ruby language is more important than any 
given year's output of all the VB programers.

Your argument is kind of like saying that housepainters cover many many 
more square inches than artists and housepainters will generally not 
work unless they are paid so pay is the important factor in determining 
the output of painters. It is true only in one limited sense.