[Cryptography] Open Source developer employment agreements, was: Cue the blamestorming

Tom Mitchell mitch at niftyegg.com
Mon Apr 21 22:49:15 EDT 2014


On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 5:58 PM, ianG <iang at iang.org> wrote:
> On 21/04/2014 14:29 pm, tpb-crypto at laposte.net wrote:
>>> Message du 19/04/14 03:57
>>> De : "Jason Cooper"
>>>
>>> This is critical to folks who are increasing their presence in the open
>>> source community as well. They start out as hackers, scratching an
>>> itch, gain experience, then get hired (a net loss for the community).
.....
>>> I also think this extends well beyond code cleanup. Virtually every
>>> open source developer I've ever spoken with has a (lengthy) list of
>>> improvements, features, projects, and cleanups they simply don't have
>>> time for. I know I do [1], [2]...
>>>
>>
>> Creating a jedi order for programmers seems to be the way. Stallman's organization has that idea already, but they don't sustain their members yet with food and clothing and public buildings, neither do they demand total dedication.
>
>
> This is the guild solution.  Although it is appealing, there are always
> those who don't like the result.

Schools....
Schools have the notion of peer reviewed publications.
Schools that teach programming should publish programs.

Yes it is serious work if you intend to accomplish something
important but in the spirit of Unix we do not need large
chunks of code we do need relentless improvement.

Yes a counter example is X11

Teach literate programming.

We have things like Coverity's analysis of code
professors could take on each small pile and
polish or fix existing code where possible or publish
productive reviews.

Hiring managers could then rate schools based on
bug fixes and other obvious to me metrics.

One programmer I respect spent months reviewing
a massive pile of company generated and open source
code before jumping in.




-- 
  T o m    M i t c h e l l


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