[TYPO3-hci] ...was inspiring people to slave, now lets talk turkey...

[Kasper Skårhøj]

Hi Matthew,

Your proposal to turn TYPO3 into a fully commercial project paid with  
taxes is of course one possible consequence to take from the  
recognition of peoples - often egocentric - reasons to contribute.  
However, I actually think its the sure death for what we do and the  
very opposite of everything a voluntary Open Source community likes  
ours stand for.

In this regard I agree fully to what Erik Svendsen wrote.

What you do not recognize is that the "personal itch" is at least as  
strong as money and delivers better software. I'm arguing that we are  
increasingly subduing the "personal itch" in our community and we  
should strenghen it instead. If we began to develop TYPO3 through  
taxes we would be no different from ( in fact worse than) any  
commercial CMS out there that we have been beating for years, we  
would have to change all developers to new ones that buys that new  
way of working and the community would loose their attachment to the  
project. We would loose our "soul" and die. I will probably never  
recommend going down the "tax-road". Taxes are mostly used to finance  
a public sector which the larger it grows gets more and more  
unsatisfied, craving, passive individuals (despite the original  
vision of commonly funded welfare for all). I want the opposite; A  
tiny public service from the T3A whose most important job will be to  
provide the playground for individual initiative.

What I do recommend is that we strenghen the personal incentives  
everyone has to contribute. We have not at all reached the potential  
of classic Open Source motivations like personal itch,  
acknowledgement and a wise crowd. Why? Because we have been blind to  
the strength of these factors although the best examples are right in  
front of us; The extension repository!

The volume of the Extension repository represents a compelling  
argument that personal itch is very much alive.  If you set people  
free to solve their problems they will, far more than money could do  
for us. This is the surprising strength of Open Source. In addition  
they seem aware to share their solutions!

Then we have lots of weaknesses; Bad extensions, bad documentation,  
low incentive to do this and that, chaos here and there. But most -  
if not all - of this can be solved if we intelligently apply self- 
balancing mechanisms in the community that tend to filter all these  
things by themselves - including security reviews. Systems like  
ratings can solve this for us.

We need to get out of a paradigm where we continue to prefer manual  
solutions to problems and get into the power of the wisdom hidden  
inside of crowd.

FInally, I want to stress another important thing:

Its important to separate between the motivation to "produce" Open  
Source and "share" Open Source. Some that may have been frightened  
that I'm loosing my idealism shouldn't fear. The truth is that  
probably none of us have coded more than 100 lines of code that we  
had absolutely not incentive to produce. Lets just face it, that  
whether it was a clients project, passion, social acknowledgement or  
fun and art, we did it because we had a motivation.

The key to our idealism is to share it - the product - without a  
second thought!

- kasper



On Oct 16, 2006, at 7:52 , Matthew Manderson wrote:

>
>> In fact it's a stupid one, primarly because it's somehow not
>> the expectations of people that looks at Open Source.
>
> Ah well. I am sure your use of the term 'stupid' was not a mistake.  
> Good
> luck.
>
> I am glad to hear assurance that the T3A is exploring this issue. I  
> just
> never read anything significant about it.
>
> Re-read the Kasper vs Joey discussion to see the learned but false  
> dichotomy
> that TYPO3 faces all in the name of OpenSource.
>
> I hope it gets resolved soon.
>
> Enjoy.
> Matthew
>
>
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- kasper

"Necessity is the mother of invention"
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