| That's commendable, I love it. As other commenters said, I'd absolutely love to break my back working on improving the status quo [through free open source] but I am not paid for it. Like damn, I couldn't even convince some colleagues to use `just` as opposed to `make` and the migration path is trivial for most normal development cases (not talking about old Linux libraries or the kernel, of course). Takes literally 15 minutes, once, to rewrite your task file and you're done and you can write much less and have your stuff done predictably. But no, "I don't want to learn a new tool". Coming from a 25-year old. <facepalm> If I can't even do the above, while clearly demonstrating the benefits to productivity and less mistakes due to the hundreds of footguns of the legacy technology... then what hope do we even have to, say, finally start working on a completely new shell without the limitations of the current ones? What hope do we have to finally fix the entire X.org / Wayland mess on Linux and have a unified ecosystem? Practically zero. Because apparently there are people who would defend any idiosyncratic technology with their fists, it turns out. I'd go on a limb and say that 95% of the best of the best programmers out there are trapped in lucrative jobs where they have almost zero creative freedom. I hate it as well but we have to ensure our own survival first, and that's a constant grind in this civilization. Hence you can spend your ENTIRE career dreaming of doing something else and never actually do it. Hold that thought for a moment, it's a very good reality check. Initiatives like in the OP give me hope that at least some generous people would take a look and say "hey, that makes it easier for me to donate / fund efforts"... but I am not holding my breath. Our current society does not optimize for any of this. Finally, the biggest problem is discoverability. I and many others (to be clear, I am not putting myself in the group of "the best of the best of the programmers" but I am a guy who gets crap done nonetheless) simply are too tired and jaded to go participate in weekend hackathons or any R&D events (if such even exist?) so they end up being full of young inexperienced people whose net worth to the R&D arena is close to zero. :( Is there even a solution? IMO not until the incentives change, dramatically so. Or you become a millionaire somehow and then all your burnout magically disappears and you ambitiously became a benevolent dictator of several such efforts until you're satisfied the entire thing is a less shaky house of cards. But that doesn't sound like a probable scenario: most people, when they eventually make it, are way too psychologically tired to then actually start doing everything else they wanted in the profession before. They prefer to lie on beaches and boy, do I understand them perfectly. <saddened rant ends here> |
I've recently discovered first hand that there are people who will give money away for little to nothing in return. Two examples:
1. I have a friend who makes over $300K/year as a ship's captain. She has way more money than she needs. One this she does with all her disposable income is fund kickstarters.
2. Last year, a random stranger spent $200 to buy gifts for my 3 kids just because my wife replied to a facebook thread on the topic of "what does everyone's kids want for Christmas". The woman wasn't even the OP on the tread. I'm not sure why she picked my family, I guess she just was charmed that my kids wanted sleeping bags.
> Finally, the biggest problem is discoverability.
This is true. Especially, when the concept of software development cost is so difficult to explain to a layperson. One can easily grasp the creative value of funding a Kickstarter for a graphic novel. How do you get non-technical person excited about software?