[pLog-svn] Look what I found

[Jason King]

Opensource is a cold mistress. You give her everything she wants. Feed 
her with your blood, sweat, and tears and in the end she ends up giving 
it away to anybody that asks for it. She'll get out on the street and 
put dough in other people's pockets but unless you ask her just the 
right way she never brings any your way.

Hi all. I've been lurking on this list for a couple weeks now. Haven't 
had much to say about the changes and work everybody's been doing. I've 
submitted a couple useless things so far. Don't know when I'll ever have 
much of anything useful to send up the pipe. Haven't had a chance to 
check out the work done on object caching and performance tweaking but I 
have to say that streamlining the code like that sure sounds great to me.

But this thread piqued my interest. Its rough seeing former 
users/contributors telling other developers to pull apart your code to 
see how you did it so they can do it and make money from it. I didn't 
even write the code and it provokes some reptillian response in me. On 
the bright side now these people who have gone BH can drive other 
developers crazy. They still seem to think that whatever they need for 
their business the developers should have done for them tomorrow...for 
free, or close to it.

I think Mark's idea about a rough roadmap from the Plog site is a great 
idea. I also think defining what Plog is all about would be a great 
idea. Is Plog even geared toward BSPs? Its a little confusing maybe. It 
seems that the one thing everybody seems to be saying is that as 
personally rewarding as it is to write "friggin great software" it sure 
is irritating that no one is being financially rewarded for same. The 
problem with opensource and I think this goes straight back to Stallman 
is that it creates sort of an anti-business mindset. The only out of the 
box business model I can think of  for opensource code is charging for 
support or custom modifications/additions. Unfortunately only businesses 
are really going to want to pay real wages for either of these things. 
End-users see open source as free software. I sure as heck don't want to 
pay someone for code on an opensource project for something that I'm not 
making any money with, besides I can just modify it myself, hence the 
real point of the "open" in open source. If I was running a business and 
was making money off it then it would be different.

Mambo let people develop commercial components and I think it created a 
certain cloud around that project for a lot of people. Really 
frustrating to have the core developers try to support themselves by 
giving you a little taste for free and then yanking out the cash 
register once you get hooked.

There's always run a turnkey hosting operation using plog. If anyone 
thought there was interest in that I think it could be interesting.

You could set up a bounty system like Horde has. That way if people 
really want stuff done they can offer cash money for someone to do it 
for them. The catch, does the new code get GPL'd or does it belong to 
whoever paid for it, or whoever wrote it?

But I think the important thing is to get to the bottom of whatever it 
is that's bugging everybody about this and try to solve that. Is it that 
plog isn't getting the attention it deserves? Developer's aren't getting 
any compensation from the project? Other people are 'stealing' ideas and 
plugging plog code into their projects?

Just wonderin'

Best,
Jason