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Posts: 521 | Thanked: 296 times | Joined on Sep 2009
#10
Originally Posted by w00t View Post
Having done a lot of OSS development, and a lot of paid development, I'd strongly disagree with this.

The only difference between paid and unpaid development is that paid development (usually) has leadership which is hopefully in a fairly strong position already to be able to support developers, so, they have enough direction to be able to make things like proper QA happen.

Hobbyist developers, on the other hand, either work in groups of peer development without many formal processes, or solo - and don't have a lot of project management experience.

Both of these brushes can't be tarred across the whole spectrum, though, there are *plenty* of exceptions to every rule. It only takes high profile disasters like Windows ME - and to give a counter example, OpenSSL (and the like) to see it's possible to have it totally different from what I've outlined above.

Getting back to my point, though: what a project needs is direction. If it lacks it, all the money in the world isn't going to save it.
I must be running with the 'older' crowd, all the developers I know have bills to pay, mouths to feed. The last thing they want to do is go home and spend their free time on something that is given away for free UNLESS it enhances their professional development (learning new techniques, APIs)

Maybe its different for developers with only a few years experience or those with rich parents.