A non economic bootstrapping approach

>

> there'll be a lot of expenses and equipment costs. Where will those
> billions of dollars come from?
>
> Can you elaborate more? Help me see your concept more clearly.

I certainly don't know where money for hardware would come from. On the
other hand, as discussed before, 90% of the cost of a space project is
not in the hardware and launch costs but in the labor. Most of that
labor is spent creating information that resides in computers and
therefore is very similar to software. I also must add here that a lot
of that labor is totally wasted. Any reduction in the labor cost by
having some of the up front work done could be a significant reduction
in the cost of a program.

The other major cost reduction would be to use the same seed and growth
architecture on the terrestrial side as well as the space side.

>
> Have you read the book "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric
> Raymond?

No, I had not. I was familiar with the basics from my work with open
source code. I see software as manipulation of information and hardware
design as manipulation of information. In that way the "Bazaar" method
should be just as effective. The most important negative from his paper
relating to this approach was:

<*It's fairly clear that one cannot code from the ground up in bazaar
style [IN]. One can test, debug and improve in bazaar style, but it
would be very hard to originate a project in bazaar mode. Linus didn't
try it. I didn't either. Your nascent developer community needs to have
something runnable and testable to play with.*>

It seems that starter seeds are useful in many ways. This is a difficult
problem. I am open to suggestions of where to get the pieces to
assemble a seed.

> Furthermore, many of these people are not necessarily working in the
> basement of their homes on their off hours writing software. They
> are actually getting paid by auto, aircraft, pharmaceutical
> manufacturers, etc. to support systems.
> Also, the companies
> that employ these folks are in the business of selling their work for
> a profit.

I think that Eric Raymond answered this very well during his statements
on the uselessness of software management:

<*The success of the open-source community sharpens this question
considerably, by providing hard evidence that it is often cheaper and
more effective to recruit self-selected volunteers from the Internet
than it is to manage buildings full of people who would rather be doing
something else.*>

What else would they rather be doing? Something useful and
interesting. From my experience there is a lot talent going to waste
because it has been assigned to activities totally unrelated to the
person's expertise or interests and nobody is going to be fired for
working in areas they haven't been assigned to in their free time.

While I am unable to conceive of people being paid to work on this, not
so long ago it was inconceivable that people would be paid to work on
open source projects directly and not just adjunct to the work that they
were supposed to be doing.

Mitchell James
www.InnerTransit.org (web based Collaborative Development)