[godelski]

I just want to say, what a dream. To have wealth and be able to create projects for the sake of going the projects. To not have to make the concessions of quality for profits.

There's an old Knuth quote:

  > In fact what I would like to see is thousands of computer scientists let loose to do whatever they want. That's what really advances the field.

And I think we're seeing more and more that these projects made with love are successful. That without the hyper fixation on money we can build good projects that make big changes in a world.

In some sense I'm a bit envious of Mitchell but truthfully these types of things make me more question how we've constructed our society and economy. It shouldn't require one to start with wealth to be able to build things that have such an impact. What needs to be changed where we can live up to what Knuth proclaimed. I'm sure all of us have had experiences where were we given the time (and usually not much) we could make things so much better. But we make many sacrifices when we rush. Which leads to more good advice by Knuth

  > If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy.

At what point do we push back? We see that the people we really look up to did things so differently. Knuth himself expressed how detail obsessed he was, and such a claim is common among the grey breads. Of course, things change, but are we creating a world with no wizards? Are we creating a world where we reward people for solving problems and making our lives easier? Or are we just maximizing some score of a pointless game?

I'd love to live in a world with a thousand more Mitchells, following their passions without the burden of needing to justify decisions to a board who has no interest in quality. How do we create that world?

Like you said, what a legend. But, how do we make more legends?

[mikestorrent]

What we are missing is a sponsorship model that is able to fun this kind of thing. It's not infeasible - look at university grants dispersement as an example of the overwrought predecessor of this. A ton of money moves through such institutions, and funds a lot of interesting projects.

One thing I've been envisioning is something like a "certified B corporation" style qualification that companies can get that indicates they contribute financially back to open source commensurate to the amount of it they consume to run their core business. If everything you do runs through open source software, in a moral sense, one can make the argument that you owe something back to it.

[godelski]

Having recently come out of grad school, tell me about it...

But the same general problem exists in industry. Our fear of doing things non-optimally only results in a less optimal solution. It's a risky move to take no risks.

In both academia and industry you see the same people doing the same things in the same way. It's no wonder things don't change. You can't have a paradigm shift by following the paradigm (playing it safe). I feel like this is a big shame in both tech and academia as the histories of these have always been made by those who rocked the boat. At some point we just have to admit we're not very good at predicting the future and instead of trying to predict what will be the most successful we should fund passion. I'm sure charlatans will get funded too, but its not like we're doing a good job at preventing that from happening now anyways...