Hello and strategy for getting full-time paid developers

[spanggaard]

Hello.

I am quite interested in seeing COSA implemented. I have spent a lot of time from 1999 to 2007 on developing http://www.reactos.org - an open source operating system compatible with Windows applications and device drivers. When working on ReactOS I did work on features such as Symmetric Multiprocessor suport, boot loader, kernel, installer, NE2000 network device driver, NDIS, TDI, windows sockets and other Win32 APIs.


The Network - a Peer-to-Peer Operating System
I'm on an ambitious mission to improve the quality of lives of people in the world with subgoals such a full decentralization of power, ending the elitist monetary control mechanism and more because well...I'm crazy

I describe my goals here:
http://www.miramission.org/documents/mi ... _goals.pdf

I propose a new kind of social structure - a decentralized representative democracy explained here:
http://trac.miramission.org/wiki/drd-De ... eDemocracy

In order to organize such a social structure, I see a need for a global platform. I'm thinking a Peer-to-Peer Operating System is the way to go because we wouldn't want the information to be controlled by a few elitist people as they will just use such data to oppress the population as seen before. Also such an operating system would have numerous benefits.

I provide an overview of my thoughts on such a Peer-to-Peer Operating System, which I currently refer to as The Network, here:
http://trac.miramission.org/wiki/net-overview

The Network should be accessible using just a HTMT5/WebGL-compatible browser to increase adoption.

I was previously thinking about using Windows Workflows because it is much easier for humans to develop and maintain software visually, but having read about COSA, I think it would be better to build The Network on top of a COSA runtime that could run on various architectures. It is, in my opinion, best to implement the COSA runtime using the GNU toolchain, eg. GNU C++ / GNU C / GNU Assembler as it supports many different architechtures. The world is not going to throw away all the existing computer architectures and adopt COSA optimized processors everywhere any time soon. When COSA processors arrive, the GNU toolchain can be extended to those architectures since they are open source.


Develop The Network/Distributed COSA applications using just a browser
I imagine something like first developing the COSA IDE in a Rapid Application Development for instance .NET/SharpDevelop IDE to get something working fast and then, when the platform is ready for it, re-implement a COSA IDE as a The Network/Distributed COSA application and just throw the .NET IDE version away. I encourage you to look into HTML5/WebGL as it brings new opportunities with it and makes web development much easier than today. Quake II has even been ported to HTML/WebGL http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/20 ... html5.html


Strategy for getting full-time paid COSA developers
The elite have wast resources at their disposal to buy politicians and so-called "credible" scientists - the science police that is used to oppress the population. We have little resources, so we must be smarter to succeed.

5 developers working in their spare time could maybe average 1 hour per day for a total of 1,825 hours per year. Too slow in my opinion.

I have done lots of research in affiliate marketing and search engine optimization. I'm currently developing software to host mini websites and I'm documenting the process on how to use this to make money by getting targetted vistors from search engines.
I'm thinking that I would share this information/system with developers that are passionate about seeing COSA/The Network/Mira Mission become real and would spend the money on it's development and their own cost of living. What we would do is something like this:

1) I do some keyword research (or you can buy the link assistant tool and do this yourself) to find suitable keywords
2) You research affiliate opportunities for those keywords (eg. small embedded Amazon.com store with relevant products)
3) You buy some domains suitable for getting to the topmost search result on Google and other search engines for the keywords
4) You setup mini websites on your domains
5) You build quality backlinks to your domains to get to the topmost search result for the keywords. There are various ways to do this: automatic, article writing, and more. I will show you how to increase their value in search engines.
6) You get all the money from your own domains and spend it on full-time paid developers in addition to your own cost of living

The only expenses you would have is the cost of the domains (~$10/.com domain/year) and maybe later some website traffic expenses. Digital products typically cost $49 - $99 of which you as an affiliate typically would get 25% - 75%. For physical products the commission is lower. Amazon.com pays 4% to 15% commission, but typically the average per sale revenue is higher.

Say your cost of living $50,000/year and you can get a conservative 500,000 targetted visitors to your mini websites per month, then assuming an average per sale commission of a conservative $10 and 4% conversion rate, you would earn $200,000/month. This may sound like a lot to you, but I truly do believe that these are conservative estimates - affiliate marketing and advertising are multi-billion dollar industries. That leaves $150,000/month or $1,800,000 per year for full-time COSA/The Network developers.

We can get a full-time chineese developer for ~$17,000/year. Such a developer can work about 1,700 hours/year. This means 1 person doing the above could buy 105 chineese developers for a year - a total of 178,500 person hours/year. 5 people doing the above can buy 892,500 person hours/year. Of course there would be other expenses to manage that many developers.

You could then focus on the overall design while other developers get paid to implement COSA/The Network.

This is a simple, but time consuming process. However the time will be well spent because once the domains are on top of the search engines for the right keywords, then you can make money every month without additional work and expenses would only be the cost of your domains. You may once in a while have to spend some time fighting off some compettitors that will try to steal "your" visitors on some keywords though.

I have been thinking of eventually creating a non-profit foundation which could fulfil the Mira Mission goals and relevant projects such as COSA/The Network. Such a foundation could receive donations and manage the developers.

Let me know what you think.

Best regards,
Casper

[sixwings]

Casper,

Welcome to the Rebel Science forum. I am glad to see you are interested in COSA and that you are a rebel at heart. I don't have enough knowledge about business to determine the value of your suggestions with regard to setting up a web business and the like. While I give it further thought, I encourage the other forum members to chime in and add their opinions.

[sprucely]

I usually consider money-generating opportunities with suspicion when they promise large output to input ratios. That's probably why I've never actually pursued one. So maybe I'm missing out .

I actually have a website that ranks high on google. It's #3 on a search for "christian drama" and 5 or 6 for the same search without quotes. I haven't done anything with it for years. I could probably make a little bit of money if I included something like Google's AdSense. I just haven't bothered.

[spanggaard]

Good thing I didn't make such promises then.

The first 3 search results get about 80% of the vistors. If you are at result 5 then you don't get much of the traffic. You need to know the story in the consumer's head when they search for a keyword. For "christian drama", what is their story? If you cannot determine their story from the keyword or if the story is not either "I want to buy product X" or "I want to know more about product X and possibly buy it", then the keyword is no good. If the keyword is good, then give the visitor what they want - easily.

"Toys" is a poor keyword unless you have a monopoly on toys and can deliver all toys to them - easily. "holiday barbie doll" may be a good keyword if you can profit from directing the visitor to a shop in the visitors area (or possibly an online shop) where she can buy a holiday barbie doll - easily. You should also consider the competition and number of searches on the keyword to figure out if it is worth your time.

[harry666t]

Hello, Casper! I'm the local devil's advocate, so please don't be disheartened by some of my comments It's kind of my nature to be the contradictor.

I have spent a lot of time from 1999 to 2007 on developing http://www.reactos.org

That's effing great! It seems you'll be the man to talk to, whenever there's an OS design issue. I'm pretty excited about the potential of a bare-metal COSA OS. ^^

I'm on an ambitious mission to improve the quality of lives of people in the world with subgoals such a full decentralization of power

I've looked through your paper. You're proposing a technical solution to a social problem - it will not work. You need to change both each single human's own consciousness and the humanity's collective consciousness to make this kind of political/social revolution. And a change either comes deep from within you, or is superficial. If the people are not ready to form a decentralised gov't/representative democracy, the new system will be abused just as much as the current one.

Spiritual growth is a path of no shortcuts.

I'm thinking a Peer-to-Peer Operating System is the way to go because we wouldn't want the information to be controlled by a few elitist people

Remember that there are four whole OSI layers before we get to implement application protocols - most importantly, the physical layer. You do not own the cable that runs your network. If you want this to really work, you need 802.11s or something similar, because the laws to fully control (read: censor) the flow of information through the 'net are almost in place (and with the laws, the appropriate technology will quickly follow - if it isn't already there). I wonder how many deployed WiFi devices are s-capable.

However, a decentralized content distribution/communication network is a really good idea. By the way, have you looked at project Freenet?

It is, in my opinion, best to implement the COSA runtime using the GNU toolchain. (...) When COSA processors arrive, the GNU toolchain can be extended to those architectures

If a C compiler could output efficient and reliable code for a COSA-style CPU/VM, why the hell are we implementing COSA? The whole point of the project is that current software sucks and we're up to fix it.

Develop The Network/Distributed COSA applications using just a browser

We've been talking about using web technologies to create UI and communication channels for COSA. I don't really like the web, and I think that relying on it as the primary UI is a gross mistake. Just think about it: bare metal, then an OS, then a desktop environment, then a browser, and then COSA. Many unnecessary layers of abstraction. Operating systems are unstable. Web browsers are unstable. Web browsers are shitty! We'd be building a fortress on a pile of Schrott.

Also, just to remind you: today's web is really, really heavily centralized. It has a history of being monkey-patched to fit into tasks that were never thought of when it was first created. Retrofitting it for a peer-to-peer model will be yet another walk through hell, for everyone involved.

I imagine something like first developing the COSA IDE in a Rapid Application Development for instance .NET/SharpDevelop IDE to get something working fast

This is exactly what I'm doing right here and now. See project Reactor: http://www.rebelscience.org/discussion/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=31, thoughts on graphical debugger: http://www.rebelscience.org/discussion/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=36.

Strategy for getting full-time paid COSA developers

We can get a full-time chineese developer for ~$17,000/year. [...] This means 1 person doing the above could buy 105 chineese developers for a year - a total of 178,500 person hours/year.

Disclaimer: I'm neither a businessman, nor a manager. I'm a programmer. However, I have a few objections.

There was this book, "Mythical Man-Month" or slt. I didn't actually read it, but the core message is (or should be) known by almost every person involved in a big software project: you can't increase team productivity by simply throwing more manpower at the problem. Also, not that I'm racist or something, but when I hear "105 chinese developers", I have this funny image of a million monkeys at typewriters.

Also, COSA is radically different from all existing software development models. I know people have a hard time trying to fully grasp it - I've had such problems too. I was trying to explain the idea to my father, who has always been a computer architecture&software development guru to me - and I failed at this. Now try to explain it to 100 people who probably can't even speak english well.

I'd propose a different strategy: wait for open source developers to simply start contributing to various sub-projects. Maybe attract them somehow. We're already drawing some attention, some code has already been written&released, people are full of ideas. Once we get a lot of regular, part-time contributors, we might offer them full-time jobs.

if you do something because you like doing it (and not necessarily because you're being paid), you're simply more productive. And when you're getting paid as well - I guess there aren't too many better ways to make a living (except for hitch hiking to India with a beautiful and intelligent female Hippie, building a hut in Himalayas, and spending rest of your life smoking moderate amounts of weed, meditating, and re-establishing your natural connection with Mother Earth, but that ain't best for everyone - Himalayas couldn't fit 7 billion people!).

[spanggaard]

Hello, Casper! I'm the local devil's advocate, so please don't be disheartened by some of my comments It's kind of my nature to be the contradictor.

That's fine. I need to know where the difficulties are. I know this is a huge job.

I've looked through your paper. You're proposing a technical solution to a social problem - it will not work.

I'm not proposing a technical solution to a social problem. It's the other way around. I'm thinking about the technology that would be required to support such a social structure - a decentralized representative democracy (which is not fully designed yet btw.)

History has shown us that people will look at alternative governance when their suffering is too great. When economies have collapsed, people began to barter amongst themselves rather than sending their money they didn't have to the elite. So far the privately owned and criminal International Monetary Fund and World Bank have "rescued" such countries by giving them huge loans when in trouble so they have economic control over whole countries (debt is a control mechanism).

http://www.usdebtclock.org shows that every single american owe $175,000 in debt spent by them and their politicians. However 43.4 million americans pay zero federal income tax.

About half of US trade deficit goes to China. What are the Chineese government going to do with all that new power? Expand their centralized government communistic social structure to other countries? Many other countries have huge debts. What are the prospects of paying all that money back (mostly to the elites)?

Capitalism says you should buy the cheapest and sell for maximum revenue to get maximum profit. Capitalists use outsourcing to buy cheaper. If cheaper countries will stay cheap, then rich countries will get poorer. So wages in countries will approach a similar level no matter what. This leads me to number two tool for corporations to profit - automation.

If a corporation can build a machine that can do the job of a person, then they will do that, because machines are typically cheaper and more efficient than humans. This would be fine if everyone had access to the products made by that machine, but it's not fine when access is artifically controlled using money. As the production of more and more products are done using automation, purchase power is lowered all the time. What will happen then? Mass unemployment. The countries would have to take up more debt to finance the cost of living for their citizens. More people become dependant on the system. This can only lead to one thing as long as the current monetary system exists - fascism. The absolute control of every human being by a few elitists. Whether due to fasism or a failing monetary system, people will fight for their survival and freedom leading to more crime, violence and deaths.

History shows that empires don't last (Rome being a good example). So what I'm trying to do is show people an alternative way when the current system fails.

And consciousness IS already changing. WiserEarth estimates there being more than one million organizations and many millions of us around the world who are actively working toward ecological sustainability, economic justice, human rights protection, political accountability and peace.

Will it work? I have no idea, but if you don't try you will achieve nothing with 100% certainty.

Remember that there are four whole OSI layers before we get to implement application protocols - most importantly, the physical layer. You do not own the cable that runs your network.

Regarding decentralized information control at the physical level. This already happens. In Berlin, the Freifunk (http://start.freifunk.net) mesh is a decentralized network of WLANs. Even here in small country Denmark a group of people put together private Internet access in the country side because no internet service providers wanted to give them proper Internet access. There are more of such mesh networks and more will popup in the future. You may also have heard of FON (http://www.fon.com).

In addition to freenet, as you mention, there is also TOR (http://www.torproject.org/).

http://p2pfoundation.net explains how the world is moving toward peer-to-peer.

If a C compiler could output efficient and reliable code for a COSA-style CPU/VM, why the hell are we implementing COSA?

Because you need to run the COSA runtime on existing platforms such as Windows to get wide acceptance. Part of Microsofts success is because they took compatibility very seriously. They even fixed up buggy old games at runtime to get them to run on newer platforms so people would upgrade. So you cannot require a COSA machine to get people to setup a COSA node. Support COSA on top of Windows and Linux and you remove a road block to acceptance.

We've been talking about using web technologies to create UI and communication channels for COSA. I don't really like the web, and I think that relying on it as the primary UI is a gross mistake.

Again, to increase acceptance. The user's don't care about the technology/COSA. They just want the benefits of the applications. People are not going to dedicate an entire machine to a COSA installation just because COSA is a cool technology. Developers are not going to develop applications unless a lot of users can use their applications. If you don't make sure that COSA can be used with existing technology that user's are familar with, then you are not going to get more than a few thousand technology enthusiasts to use and develop COSA in their spare time. Notice that Linux had to support Windows technologies (eg. SAMBA) to get even a small percentage of the desktop market. Also communication between nodes should be firewall friendly to increase acceptance. You cannot go too far in a single step.

This doesn't mean that you can't build a COSA optimized machine which executes nothing but COSA instructions. People just won't buy it unless COSA has gotten wide acceptance as a platform - web friendliness can help get that acceptance.

You can develop additional user interfaces. I could imagine that a COSA node runing on a coffee maker machine would have a different user interface

Also, just to remind you: today's web is really, really heavily centralized.

Yes. DNS is hard to make P2P friendly.

There was this book, "Mythical Man-Month" or slt. I didn't actually read it, but the core message is (or should be) known by almost every person involved in a big software project: you can't increase team productivity by simply throwing more manpower at the problem. Also, not that I'm racist or something, but when I hear "105 chinese developers", I have this funny image of a million monkeys at typewriters.

Yes, but you can create an ulimited number of teams working on solving different problems. The developers of SCUM says 5 to 9 team members is a good team size. There is no reason to believe that chineese developers are worse than your average western developer. I've seen what these average western developers can produce from doing IT-consulting for both small, medium and large corporations for 9 years and I'm not impressed. No one can build quality software today ;-( China has more scientists than the US btw.

Once we get a lot of regular, part-time contributors, we might offer them full-time jobs.

How are you going to be able to pay them? If there is no value, then there is no income. With COSA, there is a long road to delivering more value to users than existing solutions already provide.

[nevele]

ideas without action produce nothing, casper.

you've got plenty of ideas here. if I'm reading you right:

you want social change.
you want decentralization of technology.
you want to encourage development of COSA architecture.
...you want to fund all of this by selling other people's stuff.

you want a lot. it's good to want.
but ideas without action produce nothing.

you've obviously done some homework. you use plenty of internet marketing buzzwords. you've done a halfway decent job communicating how easy it is to make money online -- and I have no doubt that you think it's easy to accomplish. ideas are easy, after all.

but action. what action is needed to fund your social change? your network? to outsource COSA development? just some keyword research and 'minisite' automation scripts, right? easy as pie to get 500,000 'targeted visitors' to check out your autopilot money machines, right? that's your conservative estimate?

500,000 people a month converting a $10 product at 4%.
this, conservatively, is a million dollar business.

honest question, casper.
do you operate a million dollar business?

as direct as I can: have you made your ideas real, for you?

I don't believe you have. I don't believe you have the slightest idea how difficult and time consuming it is to operate any business -- and while internet marketing does provide a huge amount of freedom, it is certainly not as easy as you'd like these people to believe. and it's nowhere near as easy as you imagine it to be.

what I do believe, is you have an idea. an idea of easy riches by selling other people's stuff on the internet. an idea, undoubtedly sold to you by people selling other people's stuff on the internet.

that's not to say you can't, or won't accomplish your ideas. I know you can, because I can.
because I did. and because I have so many ideas, just like you do.

but ideas without action produce nothing.
and your ideas are tainted with idealism. inexperience. and confusion. about what you really want.

you want social change, but you want to fund it with predatory capitalistic practices that have brought our society to where it is?
you want decentralization of power, while presenting yourself as the lynchpin of getting COSA and other noble projects funded?
you want to develop truly revolutionary technology, not through direct action, but by paying for others to do so?

this is, as far as I can tell, what you want.

you want to build something beautiful on top of one of the ugliest creations known to man?
do you really?

if you do, know what you're getting into. know what it will take to get there.
know that it will change you. unless you already are, what you want.

with love,
me.

[harry666t]

Casper,

History has shown us that people will look at alternative governance when their suffering is too great. [snip!] So what I'm trying to do is show people an alternative way when the current system fails.

OK. Now I think I understand your goals. The history has a tendency of repeating itself. We're close to fulfilling another cycle; an empire might fall in our lifetime, and you're seeing an opportunity for a change. I guess we're moving in a common direction, but following different paths.

And consciousness IS already changing. WiserEarth estimates there being more than one million organizations and many millions of us around the world who are actively working toward ecological sustainability, economic justice, human rights protection, political accountability and peace.

That's really good news. However, I'm afraid that these "many millions" (including you and me) will soon be the targets of an emerging, power-hungry, global government. Nazis killed over 5 million Jews during WW2, and 70 years ago we didn't have weapons of mass destruction, automated hunter-killer drones, insane amounts of fear-mongering to acquire social acceptance of government crimes, and most importantly - the Internet to easily spy on and locate the suspects.

I'm reluctant to discuss these topics on the 'net.

Regarding decentralized information control at the physical level. (...)

That's another handful of great news (I guess I could find this info by myself if I really have had tried). p2pfoundation.net seems interesting, I've got a few ideas of my own about a decentralised storage system: applications/users shouldn't really care whether a "document" (an abstract term describing any single, logical chunk of data) is in your computer's main memory or scattered in twelve parts across the whole globe - as long as you're authorised to access it, you can just ask for it and work with it like you would work with any object (as in OOP). I guess there might already be something like this out there. And this is something I'd love to see in COSA.

Because you need to run the COSA runtime on existing platforms such as Windows to get wide acceptance. (...) So you cannot require a COSA machine to get people to setup a COSA node. Support COSA on top of Windows and Linux and you remove a road block to acceptance.

I thought it was obvious. It will be quite a few years until I could just walk into a shop and buy a laptop with a COSA CPU, but I'd love to compose COSA programs long before this becomes a reality (heck, I'd love to start using COSA right now). The current plan, on which we've been kind of agreeing on, goes (*roughly*) like this:

1. Get a COSA VM running on a regular computer, under a regular OS (we're slowly getting there );

2. Create a full development environment working as a normal userspace app, written in a normal programming language;
2a. (Meanwhile, use the DevEnv to deliver great software. At this point, running COSA apps would be no more and no less annoying than running Java apps, which need a JRE to be installed);
2b. Heck, you could pretty much do anything you want at this point, including using COSA serverside to build web apps, or providing a web browser plugin to use it on the client side;

3. Work towards making the whole stack self-hosting. (e.g. produce a COSA compiler that would emit regular executables for i386, AMD64, ARM, CLR, JVM, anything. The compiler would need to be composed with COSA itself. Re-implement any external libraries and tools as necessary.);
3a. (Meanwhile, now running COSA apps on desktop is no less intrusive than running native apps);

4. Create a COSA operating system (running on existing hardware), to eliminate the last dependency on "hand written" source code. At the core of the OS, there will be the interpreter/compiler itself. The OS would run existing COSA apps unchanged, but wouldn't support any "legacy" code (of course, unless you hack it to do so);
4a. (Meanwhile, maybe we could use the system's UI on Linux instead of KDE or Gnome, which both suck);
4b. (Meanwhile, I could finally say: "I've been saying 'I hate all operating systems' for my whole life. Now I can't complain, as I took my part in writing one, and if it still sucks then I've only got myself to blame");

5. When the COSA CPU arrives, repurpose parts of the compiler/interpreter, throw some crap away, run the rest of the OS and apps unchanged;

Naturally, COSA CPUs might be ready before we complete the OS. The OS could be complete before we implement the compiler, etc. It might happen that COSA will find its way to embedded devices long before we could deliver desktop applications. You'll be free to re-use any part of the work, at any stage, for any purpose. There's no single, ultimate goal, except for improving the quality of software.

Again, to increase acceptance. The user's don't care about the technology/COSA. They just want the benefits of the applications. (...) Developers are not going to develop applications unless a lot of users can use their applications.

Partially true. Users don't care, so that's why I like the third step of the plan - it means a user could just run COSA programs like native applications. However, my personal opinion is that all desktop environments (along with the web) suck donkey balls, and that any empathy-capable, conscious being should use every opportunity to undermine the dominance of unusable tools and help replacing them with user-empowering solutions. We can deliver a technology to make nice apps for shitty desktops, or we can deliver nice desktops with nice apps (or we can do both).

I can't really imagine any single technology making any of the existing desktop environments dramatically more usable, and (as Apple has shown with the iPhone) if you get enough hype and actually deliver usable products, you can get away with being incompatible.

Soooo, that's why I like the fourth step - I have a vision of a task-oriented desktop environment, that does everything it can to get out of the way and just let the user get his tasks done. There will not be an "email program" or "chat program" - there will be messages and contacts. There will not be a "media playback program" - there will be a collection of songs and movies. There will not be "workspaces" or "virtual desktops" - related activities will be grouped together in more meaningful ways. There will be no files nor file systems - there will be "documents" (or "objects") and universal search. Ever noticed that it's often easier to find stuff on the web than on your own computer? I blame hierarchical file systems for this situation. Confront Google with the Open Directory Project. Heh, I've just used Google to find ODP's website.

Notice that Linux had to support Windows technologies (eg. SAMBA) to get even a small percentage of the desktop market.

This is an argument for interoperability, not for backwards compatibility. Again, with the iPhone as an example - it supports popular formats (mp3, html), protocols (http, GSM), thus is still interoperable. (Disclaimer: I don't really like the iPhone, it has lots of drawbacks and is very closed, but it serves as an excellent example in those areas that Apple got right.)

Crap, look at the first Mac! It didn't have arrow keys. It didn't have arrow keys, so that PC programmers wouldn't simply port their crappy DOS programs, and instead would try to program for the new GUI. It was a decision of historical importance.

Also communication between nodes should be firewall friendly to increase acceptance.

I haven't considered that, as I'm mostly connecting to the 'net from my home, where I set up the firewall rules. However, from my limited experience, a strict firewall rule is usually set to enforce a company policy, and if you're aiming at breaking the policy, some technical difficulties are probably the least of your worries.

web friendliness can help get that acceptance.

I'm just afraid that once COSA is accepted mainly as one of the core Web technologies, it will be doomed to stick to the web, and a chance to provide a better desktop environment will be lost forever.

Anyway, I won't be holding you back. I've released almost all of my COSA-related code under one of the craziest and most liberal licenses in the world - the WTF Public License - and when I did it, I meant it.

There is no reason to believe that chineese developers are worse than your average western developer.

Dunno, maybe it's the omnipresent "Made in China = cheap plastic crap" mentality that made me think like this. As I'm rethinking it right now, Chineese are probably one of the most wise nations in the world. They've had technology, medicine, science, and spirituality superior to western throughout most of the history. I'm sure that if we'd ever get a Chineese programmer on board, I'd be as glad to welcome him/her as anyone else.

I've seen what these average western developers can produce

I know your pain, despite being in IT for the money for less than two years. Maybe that's also why I prefer "show us your contributions, and we'll think about funding your work".

How are you going to be able to pay them?

You've proposed a scheme to make lots of money. I've only proposed an (IMHO) better way to spend it.

Uh, and look at Canonical. I think they're still operating at loss.


@nevele,

you want decentralization of power, while presenting yourself as the lynchpin of getting COSA and other noble projects funded?

I've observed it long, long ago... People see a new, cool, emerging technology/ideology/religion/whatever. What they do is to try to shoehorn it into their own worldview and use it to accomplish their own goals. This is nothing new and even I do this, by "embracing and extending" original COSA ideas. I think it's nothing to be ashamed or afraid of, as long as you intend no harm, do this with everyone's benefit in mind (not only your own), and give credit where credit is due.

You could as well be pointing finger at IBM or Red Hat for pouring serious money into Linux.

As of decentralisation of power - the current power is a... Well, powerful power. It takes power to overthrow that kind of power.

you want to build something beautiful on top of one of the ugliest creations known to man?

Sometimes you are forced to play the devil's game to escape his grip. I used to be some kind of an anarchist (can't tell you which flavour; I don't really care about labels), and I had this wonderful dream of a world without money, a world of freedom. I was 15 or 16. A few years later I realized that it was actually a complex and that it was holding me back. I've had a lot of trouble making or saving money, and THAT was actually an obstacle to fulfilling my other dreams: starting a band, traveling.

So I've worked to overcome that complex; got a nicely paid, half-time job (as a web developer, so that's double evil - I hate the web), and shortly I could buy myself all the instruments I've ever wanted, or go anywhere I wanted to. Today, I have several instruments, including: electric & acoustic guitars, basses, a fretless guitar, a banjo, an organ, a harmonica. I've learned to play all of them. Some of them, two at once. People like my music. I haven't recorded anything yet, but I already have fans! I've jokingly told friends that I'm starting a band, and a few people said that they wanted to play with me. These people actually asked ME whether they could join MY band, and that's something I could hardly imagine when I bought my first guitar for borrowed money.

Some of the very things I hated and considered evil: money and web development - they actually empowered me and gave me unexpected amounts of freedom and fulfillment. It would be IMPOSSIBLE if I hadn't changed my point of view and made a "deal with the devil" (actually, it's the name of a song by the band that was one of my greatest inspirations).