[OSM-dev] X-Prizes

[Sebastian Spaeth]

SteveC wrote:
> On 18 Mar 2008, at 17:03, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>>
>>> Anyone have any thoughts on
>>> whether it would fly?
>> It might but I fear that the coding community would be adversely  
>> affected to a point where people don't work unless paid, or "free  
>> time" programmers get shot down for taking away cash from others,  
>> whatever. Currently if someone says he's working on <subject> and  
>> he's not fast enough for my taste, I can just implement it faster;  
>> if money and prizes come into play, this makes me the evil guy who  
>> has taken away "his" money (even more so if he should have spoken  
>> about his work on the list beforehand)... all sorts of potential  
>> problems.
> 
> are there examples of where this has happened in other projects?

e.g. the Freenetproject nearly died around 2003 because there was a 
programmer hired full-time, paid by donations. Other contributors 
stopped contributing and became merely bystanders discussing on how "the 
main guy" should implement things.

It's not always that way (actually some studies couldn't detect such a 
crowding out), but there are incidents like this.

see also "crowding theories" or "crowding out" for more academic stuff 
on this.

Sebastian