FreeLists / openbeos / [openbeos] Re: Hiring Programmers

["Michael Phipps" <mphipps1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ingo did an excellent job of clarifying and I want to add to it a bit...

First of all, OpenBeOS was and is a free project. There is not any plan to 
change that. There will be *NO* charge to get the source. 

What I had in mind in the editorial was very simply donations, for now, 
possibly going into selling CDs, T-Shirts, whatever, at some point in time, a 
la BSD. But since we don't have CDs to sell right now, donations are what we 
can do.

Another *POSSIBILITY* is that the source remains free, but rolled distros could 
be sold. I know that at first this sounds contrary to "Open Source", after all, 
everybody makes .iso's available. But there is nothing that requires that an 
OSS group do so. Sure, if you want to d/l the source and build it yourself, it 
is free. If not, you pay us N dollars. This is just a possibility. Something 
that we, the admin team, haven't discussed but that I would like opinions on 
(preferably offlist unless you have some deep, meaningful exchange to share 
with the group). 

I get a fair amount of email. Not that I am complaining, mind you. ;-) But a 
lot of people write to me and say things like "I am a professional web master. 
I have 3-4 hours a week that I could possibly donate when work isn't too 
demanding" and "I can't wait for R1! I just wish that there was something I 
could do to help! But I can't code.". Neither of these folks are currently able 
to do anything to get OBOS moving faster. Donating *TO HIRE CODERS* would get 
the project done faster. As far as people who are donating their time now and 
how they would feel about people being hired? Well, not one person has 
complained to me so far, honestly. And I would very strongly consider someone 
who is donating time and doing a good job over someone "off the street", were 
there to be openings. I know that personally, I would love to quit my day job 
and code OBOS full time. But this is not about getting me out of my job. This 
is about getting the project done (well, a release out, anyway).