It is good to see the Linuxfund underway again. Altough probably everyone has an opinion on what to spend all that money on(ME ME ME!) i still want to make a suggestion: Organise some competitions like the X-price or the DARPA Grand Challenge. Choose one or two topics at a time, seek out the most vocal people/leaders in that field (For instance Guido van Rossum if Python was the topic) and let them decide on a target that promotes Linux and the current topic. How the actual contest is organised is something to figure out fot LinuxFund. I think this will be able te generate a lot of good code for the benefit of Linux. As a side effect it will generate free publicity for LinuxFund itself, allowing it to attract more LinuxFund cardholders, which in turn allows LinuxFund to organise a bigger competition next [year|semester|trimester|month|time]. The other aim (apart from good code for the benefit of all) should be to encourage risky software projects. To innovate one needs to take risks, but some/most of the time those chances don't work out (if they all work out you took too little risk). Any form that makes more OSS authors take more risk without hurting the stable baseline should be explored by LinuxFund. Maybe it should even encourage code forks and evaluate the forks for effectiveness after a set time. I think some form of competition (be it a winner-takes-all style like X-price or divide-and-conquer like Google's summer of code) will give very good results and public exposure. And while Linux probably does not need it per-se, a lot of people will love to see Linux florish.
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Organise competition(s) with it.
Posted by: JelleB on July 23, 2005 06:26 PMOrganise some competitions like the X-price or the DARPA Grand Challenge. Choose one or two topics at a time, seek out the most vocal people/leaders in that field (For instance Guido van Rossum if Python was the topic) and let them decide on a target that promotes Linux and the current topic.
How the actual contest is organised is something to figure out fot LinuxFund. I think this will be able te generate a lot of good code for the benefit of Linux. As a side effect it will generate free publicity for LinuxFund itself, allowing it to attract more LinuxFund cardholders, which in turn allows LinuxFund to organise a bigger competition next [year|semester|trimester|month|time].
The other aim (apart from good code for the benefit of all) should be to encourage risky software projects. To innovate one needs to take risks, but some/most of the time those chances don't work out (if they all work out you took too little risk). Any form that makes more OSS authors take more risk without hurting the stable baseline should be explored by LinuxFund. Maybe it should even encourage code forks and evaluate the forks for effectiveness after a set time.
I think some form of competition (be it a winner-takes-all style like X-price or divide-and-conquer like Google's summer of code) will give very good results and public exposure. And while Linux probably does not need it per-se, a lot of people will love to see Linux florish.
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