[mythtv-users] Paying one or some of the developers

[chris at cpr.homelinux.net]

On Wed, Sep 06, 2006 at 08:49:19AM -0400, Steven Adeff wrote:
>  I hope that noone would renege on their donation to the bounty,
> but I think that is the fear Isaac and perhaps other dev's have with
> the bounty concept.

That's not the impression I got.  On the one hand Isaac said that 
he doesn't want to put a lot of work into writing bountied code 
only to not get paid, but on the other hand he's also said that he 
simply has no desire to make any money from Myth.  Dean inferred 
that the reason MythTV isn't a professionally-managed project like 
Apache or Asterisk is because the application lacks commercial 
demand and the devs are happy to keep it rolling along as just a 
hobby.  At the moment, Isaac is omnipotent and doesn't have to 
debate design with us, doesn't have to follow any schedule, doesn't 
have to accept patches from anyone, and doesn't have to fix any 
bugs that don't affect him personally because Myth is untimately 
still just a "I wrote some neat code and you can use it if you 
want" kind of project.

This all adds up to "don't tell me what to write".

It's too bad that Isaac isn't interested in making MythTV into the 
next Asterisk, but that's entirely within his rights.  If people 
want design committees, scheduled development, financial backing, 
etc. then they're just going to have to fork the project and do it 
themselves.  That's what freedom #3 of the GPL is all about.