Itching and scratching (Re: source mgt. requirements solicitation)

[Stan Shebs <shebs at apple dot com>]

Tom Lord wrote:

> And, btw, surprise!: In the free software world, corporate GCC hackers
> are the relative fat cats.  Go figure.
That's because GCC hackers are doing things that are worth serious
amounts of money to people that have it to spend.  Apple has signed
up with GCC because it solves more of Apple's problems more cheaply
than the several proprietary possibilities, and having made it part
of Mac OS X, Apple's overall corporate health is now partly dependent
on GCC continuing to be a good compiler, and on fixing remaining
problems, such as slowness.

If you were able to convince Apple mgmt that you could make GCC
10x faster not using precompiled headers, I think you could name
your price and get hired the same day; that's how important the
problem is to Apple.  (You're going to have to be really convincing
though; our mgmt has listened to a hundred pitches already.)

Speaking more generally, the folks that get paid to do free software
are the ones who are solving the problems of people with the money.
It's up to us to be clever enough to figure out to solve the specific
problems in a way that improves architecture and infrastructure.
That was a key but underappreciated aspect of Cygnus' development
contracts; we would always try to go after projects that included
infrastructure improvement, but if necessary we would do something
that was random but lucrative and use the profits to pay for
generic work.

To put it more simply, find a rich person with an itch, and offer
to scratch it for them. :-)

Stan