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Lawrence Chan <stnahc@xxxxxxxx> wonders:
>one side issue is why you can get 6 good (i.e. expensive)
>programmers sitting down together and taking no money but working on
>a project for no or very low profit?! This is a capitalist world (at
>least in US) and the opportunity cost is so high that I do not see
>that there is a reason for people to do something that silly :)
The only reason would be barter, rather than money. The prospective
programmers would expect to be "paid" with the labor of their fellow
project members, so that the team could end up with something they all
want, without each individual team member having to do it all himself.
It's pure capitalism, just a different medium of exchange.
This model worked pretty well in creating Linux, by and for computer
hackers. But are there enough trader programmers with similar enough
goals and suitable temperaments to cooperate in creating a trading
platform? I'd like to think so, but I did have the dubious privilege
of watching one noble effort come to naught. A call for interested
parties gathered some fifty enthusiasts, of which maybe four were
programmers. All the rest just wanted a good, free trading platform,
written to their exact standards of course. There really wasn't much
motivation for the programmers to participate.
All the successful open-source projects of which I'm aware have started
with an initial working prototype, written by the project's champion.
If it's good enough, and the right people come in to help out, it
can work. But it remains to be seen whether this model could produce
a trading platform. The FreeMarket project seems to be the most
prominent current effort; I'm skeptical that their choice of Corba
can allow it to function in real time.
Jim
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