I have no opinion on funding aggregation and I'm squishy on
open-source pledges. I think the question is more basic:
If libraries paid their tech people better, they'd get better ones to
start with, and retain the good ones longer.
So, if that's true, what barriers—financial, institutional,
cultural—prevent that from coming to pass?
Now, I'm going to be my own "on the other hand." Actually, as Paul
Graham argues*, the best hackers aren't really motivated by
money—unless it's a life-changing amount. Although he was talking
about private-sector wages—the difference between 80k and 130k, for
example—there's still something there. Good hackers care about their
freedom on the job (and the amount of bs they have to deal with), the
problems they're given and the tools they get to use. In those
respects too, libraries are more severely disadvantaged.
Tim
*http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail188.html /
http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html
"Great programmers are sometimes said to be indifferent to money. This
isn't quite true. It is true that all they really care about is doing
interesting work. But if you make enough money, you get to work on
whatever you want, and for that reason hackers are attracted by the
idea of making really large amounts of money. But as long as they
still have to show up for work every day, they care more about what
they do there than how much they get paid for it. Economically, this
is a fact of the greatest importance, because it means you don't have
to pay great hackers anything like what they're worth. A great
programmer might be ten or a hundred times as productive as an
ordinary one, but he'll consider himself lucky to get paid three times
as much. ... But it's also because money is not the main thing they
want."
On 8/31/07, Dan Scott <denials_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> On 31/08/2007, Casey Durfee <casey_at_librarything.com> wrote:
> > I would like to see a bounty/pledge board for open source library software.
> > Libraries could pledge monetary support or staff resources towards
> > particular projects or features. Pooling money together would attract more
> > interest from developers outside of libraries. which would be especially
> > beneficial for a project like Evergreen, which is written in programming
> > languages there's not a lot of library world expertise or interest in.
>
> Eh? Most of the code in Evergreen is Perl, which is pretty
> library-world friendly (although it's also pretty heavily OO in
> places, which could be perceived as unfriendly). There's some C, but
> that's largely infrastructure that doesn't need to be touched by most
> mortals; and then the remainder is Python (for a not-yet-primetime
> configuration interface). There's some Java coming (for acquisitions
> support), but there's a fair bit of that in the library world too.
>
> That being said, I like the idea of a bounty / pledge board...
>
> --
> Dan Scott
> Laurentian University
>
Received on Fri Aug 31 2007 - 23:14:54 EDT