The smartest thing Marc Fluery has said in a while

It's not often that Marc Fluery has something intelligent to say and it's rare that it will be articulated in a manner that the rest of us can consume. In this case, we at least have the former. In this interview from BusinessWeek, we get some interesting insights that we all probably knew already, but it's always good to hear it again.[blockquote]At top of the pyramid, you have these top 2% of developers that are 10 times -- in some cases 100 times -- more productive than the rest. It's true in proprietary developments like Microsoft and true of open-source too. The value is the QA [quality-assurance testing to make sure the software works and finding and fixing bugs]. They cover more ground than we could ever test.[/blockquote]This ultimately is correct as the few will carry the rest, and I'm sure that Marc considers himself to be in that 2% or his ego would never forgive him.

He's also right about a few other things such as the desire to make money. Making money is one of the greatest motivations of a capitalist society and even the non-capitalistic societies have a form of incentive, monetary or not. The world and the international market works on a capitalistic economy regardless of whether or not a specific country endorses it. This leads us to his take on the "Myth of Open Source".

Think for a second, who works for free? I think it gets perpetrated because it's such a nice myth -- you would get love and peace, the old hippie dream you know? And it's mostly true, but across all of software, not just open-source, you have a pyramid of productivity. It's an art still -- a black art of creating great software.

Turns out the guy is the founder of a pretty significant chunk of Linux, so Point A goes out the door. So I say, "You are what I call amateur open-source or hobbyist open source, which is you have a job and then you do this because that's your passion." And then somebody in the audience yells "You mean amateur open source as opposed to asshole open source?"

So there's always that. It's normal. There are always a bunch of amateurs because they've never made money at it, and it kind of pisses them off that there was a way to do it.