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Crowd sourcing Mesa development experiment

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  • #21
    Originally posted by archibald View Post
    A competition wouldn't just be bad for the losers, it'd be bad for the whole of mesa: by definition you'd have 10 people working on 1 feature. Wouldn't it be better (less duplication of effort, faster support for new OpenGL versions) to have them working on different extensions?

    If it's a competition then anybody who can work on it full time (or take some time off work) would be at a significant advantage. I don't think that a competition will attract more people to it.
    Collaboration is good, but there is something about the prospect of winning a cash prize competition that motivates people to do it. Consider the Ansari X Prize or Netflix Prize or Orteig Prize.

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    • #22
      Originally posted by tarceri View Post
      While I can't stop anyone starting up a new project the problem I see with a competition (aside from the duplication of effort) is that you need a non profit org to sign on to the idea otherwise the prize money would likely get taxed twice, once when the organiser collected the money and again when it was paid to the dev. Just something to think about it you are going to follow up on the idea.
      Yes, afaik it would be pretty trivial to set up a non-profit here. Whether anyone would trust it enough to send money is an open question. The receiver of the money would obviously have to pay any local income taxes that apply, but they are free to take any possible steps to minimize that.
      Last edited by chrisb; 28 July 2013, 07:25 PM.

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      • #23
        Originally posted by archibald View Post
        A competition wouldn't just be bad for the losers, it'd be bad for the whole of mesa: by definition you'd have 10 people working on 1 feature. Wouldn't it be better (less duplication of effort, faster support for new OpenGL versions) to have them working on different extensions?

        If it's a competition then anybody who can work on it full time (or take some time off work) would be at a significant advantage. I don't think that a competition will attract more people to it.
        I can't even explain how shitty of an idea this "competition" is. Take the people with full time jobs first: "Hm, should I give up a months worth of work, for the possibility of receiving a price afterwards, while running the risk of not being able to pay rent and feed my family?". Which leaves out only students as potential partakers. Then, the first one to implement a sloppy version that is badly documented, but still somehow works, gets the price. Practitioners would try to take as many short cuts as possible. That surely can't be considered "quality open source development".

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        • #24
          Originally posted by Ancurio View Post
          I can't even explain how shitty of an idea this "competition" is. Take the people with full time jobs first: "Hm, should I give up a months worth of work, for the possibility of receiving a price afterwards, while running the risk of not being able to pay rent and feed my family?". Which leaves out only students as potential partakers. Then, the first one to implement a sloppy version that is badly documented, but still somehow works, gets the price. Practitioners would try to take as many short cuts as possible. That surely can't be considered "quality open source development".
          You might get a rushed, crappy and undocumented implementation, but at least you'd have LOTS of rushed, crappy and undocumented implementations! ;-)

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          • #25
            Originally posted by Ancurio View Post
            I can't even explain how shitty of an idea this "competition" is. Take the people with full time jobs first: "Hm, should I give up a months worth of work, for the possibility of receiving a price afterwards, while running the risk of not being able to pay rent and feed my family?". Which leaves out only students as potential partakers. Then, the first one to implement a sloppy version that is badly documented, but still somehow works, gets the price. Practitioners would try to take as many short cuts as possible. That surely can't be considered "quality open source development".
            What you describe is the same problem as "paid per job" contractors. There has to be some quality metrics and sometimes this approach is viewed as not suitable for all tasks, which is where pay per hour comes in. But there are obviously some tasks where it does work, like the prizes I previously mentioned. The challenge would be to find some similar tasks in the open source world, where the main problem is not something nebulous like "code quality" but, say, reverse engineering a protocol, and providing a basic implementation. Decss would be a good example, all people needed was the algorithm and a working implementation, nobody cared about the "code quality". Code quality is a difficult metric to measure, and many full time and paid per hour programmers write crappy code, there's no guarantee regardless of how you choose to fund it.

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            • #26
              donated too

              tarceri,

              I donated a bit to your cause. I really think a video is unnecessary for the amount of money you're expecting. I wouldn't bother with it. It's just more work for you.

              A few questions out of curiosity:
              a) Are you in Silicon Valley?

              b) How long do you expect to work on this project? $2500 isn't a lot for a guy with children (I know, because I'm in the same boat), so is this a one week job?

              Anyway, good luck!

              -Cameron

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              • #27
                Originally posted by hiryu View Post
                tarceri,

                I donated a bit to your cause. I really think a video is unnecessary for the amount of money you're expecting. I wouldn't bother with it. It's just more work for you.
                Yeah I came to the conclusion that the time in creating a video would be better spent elsewhere. If it gets closer to the target date and things have stalled I may reconsider.

                Originally posted by hiryu View Post
                A few questions out of curiosity:
                a) Are you in Silicon Valley?
                Nope I'm in Australia.

                Originally posted by hiryu View Post
                b) How long do you expect to work on this project? $2500 isn't a lot for a guy with children (I know, because I'm in the same boat), so is this a one week job?
                I will be working for two weeks for the $2500 target. Yes this is indeed a paycut from my normal job but I consider that my donation to this campaign, I thought about adding that fact to my campaign page but thought it might sound a bit condersending.

                Originally posted by hiryu View Post
                Anyway, good luck!

                -Cameron
                Thanks and thanks for the donation.

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                • #28
                  At the outset not a developer, just a user.

                  just a bit curious to know, was your work merged in mesa ? I did see you were able to get the required money http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/he...aphics-drivers and you also did the work that you said you would https://github.com/tarceri/mesa-debug but what is unknown (to me) was that work merged in mesa ?

                  I did look at the mesa mailing list and saw all your patches but it isn't clear either from the git repo. or from the mesa mailing list http://lists.freedesktop.org/archive...st/thread.html if those patches were accepted or not.

                  Would be nice to know. I'm sure phoronix shed light on it one way or the other but unfortunately dunno the right keyword to see what happened. The last story I could find on this is http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTQzMjU , maybe another news item/story came out after it ?

                  Update: Just saw this :-

                  http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTQ0NTg and saw the forum activity. Also saw the wiki page which was last updated 6 days ago. https://github.com/tarceri/mesa-debu...aphics-Library . Seems you're still pursuing a bit of the TODO which is left.

                  While didn't donate, once I know how your work was appreciated by mesa (or not) would share the same in some dev. circles in india. At the very least people would know that they can make a bit of money and people are interested in seeing mesa improve.
                  Last edited by shirish; 05 September 2013, 04:30 PM.

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                  • #29
                    Originally posted by shirish View Post
                    At the outset not a developer, just a user.

                    just a bit curious to know, was your work merged in mesa ? I did see you were able to get the required money http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/he...aphics-drivers and you also did the work that you said you would https://github.com/tarceri/mesa-debug but what is unknown (to me) was that work merged in mesa ?

                    I did look at the mesa mailing list and saw all your patches but it isn't clear either from the git repo. or from the mesa mailing list http://lists.freedesktop.org/archive...st/thread.html if those patches were accepted or not.

                    Would be nice to know. I'm sure phoronix shed light on it one way or the other but unfortunately dunno the right keyword to see what happened. The last story I could find on this is http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTQzMjU , maybe another news item/story came out after it ?

                    Update: Just saw this :-

                    http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTQ0NTg and saw the forum activity. Also saw the wiki page which was last updated 6 days ago. https://github.com/tarceri/mesa-debu...aphics-Library . Seems you're still pursuing a bit of the TODO which is left.

                    While didn't donate, once I know how your work was appreciated by mesa (or not) would share the same in some dev. circles in india. At the very least people would know that they can make a bit of money and people are interested in seeing mesa improve.
                    You must have looked wrong. I can see all his patches properly commited in the git log (main commit).

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                    • #30
                      Originally posted by Ancurio View Post
                      You must have looked wrong. I can see all his patches properly commited in the git log (main commit).
                      Thanx for that. I didn't look at the git log but was looking around in github to see if Mesa had issued a pull request there or something.

                      I did see after I posted Brian Paul's offer to commit after Timothy did the changes. See :-



                      so did realize it was considered for committing to mesa. Your reply just confirmed it. So good all around .

                      Now the only thing what people would be waiting for perhaps is his documentation about how he went about doing what he did. I'm sure quite a few people may have chipped so the documentation can help newbie devs. who want to get their feet wet.

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