I’ve registered for the linux.conf.au conference being held 18-23 January in Wellington. This is also a test of my feed to Planet LCA2010.

I think it is excellent that as part of the terms and conditions Australians are required to note that “New Zealand is a country in its own right”.

So, who else is going? It’ll be great, I’m sure.

I’m also going to the Kiwi Py Con on in Christchurch, this weekend coming. I’ll write more about it soon.

Stormy Peters gave the keynote this morning entitled “Would you do it again for free?”. If you pay someone for a task which they used to do gratis, it can destroy their motivation such that if you take the payment away they won’t do it anymore. As someone who helps companies figure out how to pay open source developers and support open source projects Stormy has researched this issue in open source in detail. The result in short: open source developers may change the work they are doing, but many will still continue in open source software. (That’s very short, the whole talk is well worth listening to.)

Thinking about it, I am an example of Stormy’s talk. I was a full-time employee on the eXe open source project at the University of Auckland, and have since been employed by a large proprietary software company. And it is true I have contributed in only a very minor way to the eXe project since my contract with the University expired.

eXe wasn’t a project I was involved in before being hired, in fact it was just an idea at that stage. It was an exciting time creating this software project from scratch and we delivered a successful program at the end well above the requirements of the grant which funded it all. However towards the end of the project I was pretty demotivated by the way the project was going with quality being sacrificed for eye-candy and constantly having to re-argue and defend architectural decisions over and over again. So at the end of my contract I was ready to hand over to the detractors and let them have a go.

Having left I felt I shouldn’t be critical or interfering myself, so I left them to it. I was also very busy with my new job and some other stuff. It may be petty, but I feel vindicated by the way eXe 2.0 was such a huge failure. The project has been handed over again and the new maintainers have returned to the original design/code-base and have done an excellent job of restoring the quality of eXe. There’s still a lot of cruft though.

I was working on other open source code before eXe, and I’m working on getting those projects I completed into a tidy state where they are easy to download and run, and don’t totally embarrass me. Then I’ve got several ideas I want to implement and which I will also release as open source just in case they’re of use to anyone else. I’ve also got plenty of work from my employer to do on proprietary source code, some which is manager driven and some which I think will enhance our product. And though I would rather be working on free source code, I actually enjoy my current job more than things at end of eXe.

That’s probably a lot more that you ever wanted to know about eXe history, but I think it fits the research quite well.