Re: Funding GPL projects or funding the GPL?

[Hans Reiser]

Viro, do I understand you right that you feel that what is visible to 
users will get more funding from users, and that because there will be 
far more suppliers the users will be more inclined to not pay for the 
unseen benefits than when buying cars?

My answer to this is that users should be given a sample of, say, five 
providers, each of whom gets to make their case for what they have done 
for the user.

We seek not perfection, but improvement.

Hans

PS

Some of you may be inclined to suggest that such a sampling scheme would 
tend to benefit the small contributors.....  and to this I say that more 
sophisticated mathematical models which reduce the variance between the 
importance of those in each sample so as to increase user precision of 
assessment can come later after the basic idea is started up.