GPM on LWN.net

In the spirit of passing on vaguely useful information, I notice that LWN.net has put together a handy master index of external contributors, including yours truly.

Wikipedia Pays the Price

News that Wikipedia is to start paying illustrators might come as a shock to some:

The foundation that runs Wikipedia has finally agreed to pay contributors to the online encyclopedia a modest fee for their work. But it won’t pay the thousands of people who participate in creating the wiki pages — just artists who create “key illustrations” for the site.

The payments are made possible by a $20,000 donation from Philip Greenspun, who said he was moved to give the money because of his experience seeing technical books he had originally published online appear in print.

“In comparing the Web versions to the print versions, I noticed that the publishers’ main contribution to the quality of the books was in adding professionally drawn illustrations,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “It occurred to me that when the dust settled on the Wikipedia versus Britannica question, the likely conclusion would be ‘Wikipedia is more up to date; Britannica has better illustrations.’”

In fact, this is entirely in keeping with the open source model, where it is well established that hackers do the big, interesting bits for love, but you must pay for the tiny boring bits if you want the job finished. Indeed, this forms an important part of the service offered by open source companies, whose job is essentially rounding out the free offerings.

Google Does the Decent Thing

A criticism sometimes levelled at users of open source who make changes to the code but do not distribute it is that they don't give it back to the community (which they are generally perfectly to do, under the GNU GPL, say). So it's good to see one of the highest-profile users of free software, Google, giving back code changes of its own free will. Let's hope others follow suit.

Shiny Software and Pebbles on the Cairn

Here's an important point that needs making from time to time to encourage newcomers to participate in open projects:

No one takes contributions to an Open Source project and regards them as "substandard". They are simply contributions of varying quality and use.

Be it ne'er so small, a pebble on the cairn raises the cairn: and so it is with contributions to open source and the other opens. Indeed, this is one of many (interrelated) reasons why openness is so powerful.