[ILUG] [TonStanco@aol.com: follow-up question]

[Caolan McNamara]

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Original Message <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

On 17.03.00, 15:02:38, "John Diamond" <diamondj at indigo.ie> wrote 
regarding Re: [ILUG] [TonStanco at aol.com: follow-up question]:


> >
> > Am I the only person who thinks that developers should be paid a 
royalty
> > based on the number of lines each developer contributes to a program 
that
> s
> > shipped and sold?
> The old IBM managerial model for evaluating productivity :-). Its not 
really
> a valid metric..
> regards
> John Diamond

Indeed, I spent a few hours today shrinking 2600 lines of code down to 
1500 after correcting a class hierarchy. Id hate to have an employer 
come around to me and say "tsk tsk we'll have to deduct 50% of your 
wages for those hours, shrinking our net worth you villain!" There are 
better code metrics in existence than lines of code, code points et 
al. Not that I have much truck with any of them really.

And I think that it is issues like these that are at the crux of the 
problem, it is very hard to fairly quantify what each programmer does. 
 Grunt programmer churning out line by line read statements for each 
member of a 200 variable len members == 400 lines, some thought into 
the matter could devise a more sensible mechanism in far less. "5% of 
the code takes 95% of the effort" and other semifake metrics are very 
true. There are the intractable problems, might not possible for the 
overall project to ever have existed without a vital piece of code, 
the deCSS code in LiViD for instance. Don't matter how many graphics 
and flashing lights are attached to it taking up 95% of the code, 
without that vital chunk nothing was going anywhere. 

I think the complexities of a royalty system would crush most attempts 
to make it work on a member my member basic within an open project. 
Any other mechanisms such as paying royalties based upon a project per 
project basis and letting the team work it out for themselves doesn't 
appeal to me, closed insular groups hoarding their slice of the pie 
reluctant to accept any external code. Gagh, you're back where you 
started. No you have to the give the code freely to begin with. After 
that if you can find funding for a project to pay the core developers 
then sure, great stuff. But trying to actually be "fair" to each 
developer and give to him what would be his "share", I suspect you're 
just going to be in trouble to get that to work.


C.