develooper Front page | perl.perl5.porters | Postings from August 2010

Re: TPF bug-grant report #1

Thread Previous | Thread Next
From:
Zefram
Date:
August 2, 2010 09:35
Subject:
Re: TPF bug-grant report #1
Message ID:
20100802163450.GJ21668@lake.fysh.org
Nicholas Clark wrote:
>Sadly, I don't see it as unnecessary, because we're still acquiring new bugs
>(well, newly reported bugs) faster than 1 Dave can fix them.
>
>Sadly, also, I don't have any good suggestions on how to fix this,

More Daves.  There are other core developers whose time could be
purchased.  Doesn't scale indefinitely, of course, but I expect you
could get a linear response from spending up to ten times as much money.
How much bugfixing could *you* do, for example, if you didn't have to
do anything else for your salary?

From an economics point of view: the current allocation of human
resources is globally inefficient.  An efficient allocation would have
the best Perl core hackers working primarily on the Perl core, but instead
they're mostly employed on things other than the core.  We have a classic
case of the public goods problem.  (Free software is much closer to the
ideal of a public good than any physical good can be.)  Spending sponsor
money on Dave is the beginning of an attempt to fix the market failure.
Scaling it up is an obvious next step.

(I have an obvious interest here: I'm pretty pissed off about the
long-term market failure around the application of my labour, and I'd
be very happy to end up with an arrangement that let me hack for CPAN
or the Perl core full-time.)

-zefram

Thread Previous | Thread Next


nntp.perl.org: Perl Programming lists via nntp and http.
Comments to Ask Bjørn Hansen at ask@perl.org | Group listing | About