On Aug 2, 2010, at 9:34 AM, Zefram wrote: > 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? Well, and would you *want* to? It's not the most glorious work, not everyone wants to do it. It's thankless, despite a few of us explicitly thanking Mr. Mitchell (Thanks Dave x 100_000!). > 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. +1 > (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.) Have you applied for a grant, Zefram? Best, DavidThread Previous | Thread Next