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Re: Industry versus academia




 I will add that another problem is that
> too many programmers in industry are only there because they want to make
> money, and this attitude does not generate the best hackers (nothing wrong
> with wanting to make money, but if that's ALL you care about...).

In my own experience in industry, the programmers themselves are
rarely primarily motivated by making the most money.  For example,
they often pick where to work based on a lot of criteria other than
just the compensation, such as how much they care about the product
and who are they people they work with.  However, the companies themselves
pretty much have to be concerned with revenues, at least enough to
support their own expenses as well as profit to repay the people who
provided the capital.  All that is very hard to pull off, and only
within those constraints can you decide, OK, let's do what's the
most exciting and innovative technology.  In academia you have
different constraints, and in free/open software, yet different ones...