Money Can’t Buy You Love
December 12th, 2007
I was amused to learn that Sun has announced a million dollar awards program targeted at fostering innovation around Sun’s open source development project. Those of you who have been following Ingres for a while will remember that when we first contributed Ingres to the open source community we too set up a million dollar prize fund to foster innovation in the open source development community. In hindsight it was a rookie mistake; money won’t buy you the love or respect of the open source community; many open source developers have full-time jobs as professional developers and participate in open source for fun, not profit.I suspect that the reason that Sun announced the program but won’t have the details of how it’s structured until next year is that they’re still trying to figure it all out. Interestingly the program has disappeared from the Sun front page and you have to dig deep, or follow the url above, to find it.
I’ll be watching to see how this one progresses, but I can’t help but think that a year from now Jonathon Schwartz will echo the joking comment of Warren Buffett, CEO and chairman of Berkshire Hathaway “You can’t buy love. It’s very irritating.”
