11–20 of 69 posts
I did an interview with him a few months ago if you're interested: http://jhackers.net/Kazuho_Oku.html
(come to think of it, every programmer I've interviewed so far on above site works on OSS projects for work to one degree or another)
Right now though, I'm working on trying to develop a consortium of other like-minded individuals in which we can brainstorm ideas, implement them in open source tools, then distribute them in the various forms -- either VMs, puppet manifests, docker templates, openshift gears, etc. The idea is to lighten the duties for the typical sys admin and make it easier for smaller schools to implement highly tested, rigorous deployments with minimal insight on the actual workings. It's amazing how much academia suffers from large corporations/consulting firms that gouge these smaller schools based solely off the fact that they can because they lack both qualified individuals as well as competitive salary offerings.
Basically, if an open source project is valuable to an entity with money - can be a corporation or a non-profit - then that entity may hire people to work on that open source project. Being open source, the project may not be directly profitable for whoever sponsors the work (the code itself is not being sold, might be support though), but indirect profits or non-monetary effects can be very significant and enough to make paid work make sense. (Of course this is just one kind of way to get paid to work on open source code.)
You can work on academic projects funded by public money. The results are open source. Ours, in bioinformatics: http://intermine.org
Just curious how would one go about getting involved in something like this? I'm looking for a topic for a masters thesis/possible job?
In UK, most academic posts will also be on job sites like this one http://www.jobs.ac.uk/.
You can see our job ad from when we were hiring a JS person here:
https://github.com/intermine/intermine.org/blob/master/docs/...
As for how I did it, well, I replied to a job offer looking for Python programmers :)
Yes I would. With the recent revalations reguarding the total disreguard of basic human rights, I see no other choice except fully open ecosystem designed to empower the user, and keep them Free. I personally hate Stahlams politics but he was right, and as he was right early, he was shunned, but now his idea is right for right now.
The way to do it is to find an open-source project which is strategically important to a company, and yet which can't be made proprietary without destroying its strategic value. For example, the reason Android is open-source is because it would be hard to convince a broad base of hardware partners to support it if were closed-source (and now that one particular hardware partner is starting to dominate, it's getting more closed-source). Webkit is open-source because it started as open-source, and yet it is strategically important to Apple, Google, and Opera (well, until the Blink fork, but Blink is also open-source because it was derived from Webkit). Linux is strategically important to IBM, RedHat, etc. because they sell enterprise consulting services; having the source code available gives businesses confidence that they can continue running even if the vendor goes out of business, and yet they still drop a lot of money on consulting services.
It generally does not work to start a company based on open-source principles without also thinking about the strategic implications of who else will use the technology and what incentive they have for keeping it open. For example, LiveJournal was based on open-source principles and developed MogileFS, memcached, Gearman, and LJ itself. The effect of this was that every time they did something wrong, someone would start a clone of LJ and a clump of users would move over. And then Facebook took memcached and used it as a core part of their architecture, and won the whole social networking space.