[OSGeo-Discuss] are there any unpaid developers?

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 08:10:13AM +0200, Andrea Aime wrote:
> Ian Turton ha scritto:
>> One of my students was asking today about the open source development
>> process (with special reference to geospatial projects). One question
>> I'm left with is are there any OSGEO developers who are doing this
>> just for the fun and fame? I know that a lot of us have fun developing
>> but everyone I could think of (GeoTools, GeoServer, uDig) gets paid to
>> have that fun.
>
> My first few years of Geotools were completely unpaid: wake up at 5,
> worth though the weekends, to get it to work enough for my students
> at the uni to use (so in a sense there was a "work" purpose, but
> I was barely paid just for the hours spent in the classroom and nobody
> pushed for them use an open source library).
>
> Today I'm paid to work on GeoTools/GeoServer, but I still put in
> weekends time so there is still an unpaid portion.
> I don't think it can really go away: paid stuff is directed by
> company/customer needs /plans, on the spare time you do what you feel
> is good/necessary/fun instead.
> I don't believe you can really be "involved" if you don't have
> that kind of passion, yes, one can just "work" in an OS project,
> but it's not really the same thing as real involvement.

One of the best things that the OpenLayers project ever had came in the
form of our first PSC president, Erik Uzureau. Erik was not a big open
source community participant -- he wasn't on all the OSGeo mailing
lists, etc. His involvement was crucial precisely because of what he did
do -- which was organize and document a lot of the processes in the OL
community, as well as answering questions on the mailing list, managing
the bug tracker, etc.

Erik was instrumental in documenting our processes, and I give a
significant amount of the credit in the strict coding standards on the
OL project to Erik's attention to detail and thorough documentation.

Erik, as far as I'm aware, did almost all of his development on
OpenLayers on company time. MetaCarta gave him a portion of his time
with them as time dedicated to open source projects, and he seldom
worked outside of that time on the project.

Using only a small portion of his time, and very little to no 'personal'
time, Erik was able to accomplish great good for the project, and I
think that without him, OpenLayers wouldn't be the project it is today.
I think that this kind of thing is not entirely common, perhaps -- the
core contributors to many open source projects are also 'free time'
contributors -- but I think it can happen, and that these contributions
are just as valuable, if not more so, than the others made by hobbyists,
on a 'value per time' scale.

Best Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer