Re: [tlug] Re: Why Vista Sucks (was: linux: it's becoming ubiquitous)

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Edward Middleton writes:
 > Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
 > > Edward Middleton writes:
 > >
 > >  > is trying to do something like this.  Perhaps the ultimate business 
 > >  > model for open source development is something more like a stock 
 > >  > exchange where developers can auction project/developer time.
 > >
 > > You do know about cosource.com and sourcexchange.com, right?

 > I hadn't really looked at these before but looking at this article[1] on
 > sourceexchange.com I gather their model was to have contractors post
 > jobs and get developers to fill them.  In this situation you have one
 > customer and possibly millions of eager developers ;)  In the situation
 > we are talking about we have a small number of developers developing
 > something millions of customers are prepared to pay a small amount for.

No, sourceXchange worked in both directions, but did not do much about
trying to coordinate partnerships.  cosource.com (A Brian Behlendorf
Production) did attempt to mediate groups of buyers.

 > I don't know what happened at sourceexchange.com before they presumably
 > ran out of money and couldn't renew their domain name, but, I would
 > imagine, at best, they had thousands of contractors offering projects at
 > well bellow the production cost and no interested developers.

No, not at all.  Many of the contracts posted looked reasonable to me.
In fact, the GTK+ port of XEmacs was done by Bill Perry on a
sourceXchange contract posted by Bob Weiner (I believe that was in his
BeOpen.com incarnation).  However, the problem was that flow was not
great enough to support sourceXchange or cosource.com as businesses.

I suspect that sourceXchange had problems getting single bidders to
sign up for the whole production cost, as you suggest.  But
cosource.com's team offers had that problem that people tended to sign
up for unrealistically small amounts.