Re: git-scm.com

From: Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
Date: Jul 29, 2008, 05:15 UTC
Message-ID: <20080729051553.GB11947@spearce.org>
In-Reply-To: <7vk5f5ptwu.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

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> Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:
> > Also note that one of the major gripe with you making money off of Git 
> > could be the following: we have over 500 contributors, and most of them -- 
> > first and foremost of all, the two major contributors, Junio and Shawn -- 
> > cannot make money from Git.  Envy is wrong, but it is real.
> 
> I do not talk for Shawn, but I think that comment misses the mark by a
> large margin, at least for me.

I'm glad you guys think so highly of my contributions, but I am
only a small cog in the big machine known as "git".  I just happen
to like very-fine grained commits for any changes, which skews my
commit count upwards a bit.  There are _many_ contributors in that
"Primary Authors" list on git-scm.com who deserve attention too.  :)

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> I haven't been in this for money.  The original motivation of my
> involvement was to help sending Linus back to the kernel as quickly as
> possible, but now I primarily do this for fun.  Doing it for money would
> risk removing the fun factor.
> 
> What I personally lack right now is time and mental bandwidth.

Well, here you could have spoken for me I think. I do git because I find it fun, rewarding, and challenging. Though these days it has been a little bit more work and a little bit less fun-challenge as I am plowing through code for egit, but its a labor of love.

My contributions to Git are also about giving back, in return for the benefit I have gained over the years from using Linux, and the thousands of other open source packages that make it all work. I'm not big on kernel hacking (though I did try it for about 6 months) so this is one way I can put a few pennys back in the open source take-a-penny/leave-a-penny penny jar.

More recently I may be in a position where my new employer might be able to make some contribution to the community through part of my time. I shall see if it winds up detracting from the fun aspect of it for me. Personally I tend to get so focused on something that I have a very hard time moving away from it, and just want to focus on that one thing and do it well. Doing it at day-job may make that easier, and reduce stress on me, in turn making it more fun.

> [...] Corporate sponsors that can pay back in money but not in
> patches may be able to find other ways to help us, but I do not offhand
> know what's the most effective way for them to do so if they wanted to.

I don't know how much kernel.org needs support, but we rely heavily on kernel.org for our main distribution site of git. Its a drop in the bucket compared to the Linux kernel activity itself, but I imagine that the right sort of Linux-friendly (and Git-friendly) corporate sponsor could really help kernel.org out. Of course only so much help is really useful, and I have no idea what kernel.org's financial (and staff time) situtation is like, so I'll shut up now.

Pasky's repo.or.cz is another huge area that the community relies upon. Fortunately Pasky has been able to offer its services freely, but in the future it may reach a point where corporate support for adminstration assitance, duct-tape development, bandwidth or hardware, may be extremely beneficial.

-- 
Shawn.