[nycbug-talk] time you spend in your tasks

[Jonathan Vanasco]

On Apr 13, 2006, at 7:31 PM, michael wrote:

> I'm a little dazed.. that was a bizarre thing to say on a BSD user  
> group
> mailing list.. no reply necessary, maybe I just need a beer.

yeah, it is a completely bizarre thing to say at first glance...

but look at it this way -
	you can spend 10 hours setting up a time tracking system, creating a  
distributed backup system, and setting up a bunch of cron jobs to  
keep things in sync
or
	you can pay someone $40 to do that, and spend 9hours writing FOSS  
code ( maybe something that automagically does distributed backups  
and replaces the need to pay someone $40 )

the FOSS solutions are great when it comes to code and features - but  
there's something to be said about paying someone to deal with the  
headaches like backup/failsafe and maintenance.

do you want something to go wrong in your office, and have people  
jumping all over you non stop 'when will this be fixed?' , 'this is  
broken again!', 'hey, i'm having problems with the..."  etc.

i've been there.  it sucks.

warning,   some of you might hate this paragraph:
also, a lot of the web2.0 pay apps are funding open source  
development too. i'm not a fan of Rails, but if people weren't paying  
for BaseCamp, it probably wouldn't exist.  so many perl , ruby, and  
increasingly python, modules and frameworks are code that was in some  
pay-app, and abstracted for general use.