[Fsfe-uk] Re: MySociety.org awarded £250 ,000 to work on free-software-based websites

[Matthew Mundell]

Robin Green <address@hidden> writes:

> Those of us who are looking for a job creating free software might wish
> to now send in CVs to mysociety.org, which has just received a grant
> (in partnership with West Sussex County Council) of £250,000 to work on
> their innovative website projects.
>
> All of the code written by mysociety will be free software.

>From http://www.mysociety.org/mysoc_faq.php3:

Q. Why don't you leave it to the open source community?
A. The open source and free software communities have a formidable
track record of creating powerful and useful tools without which the
internet would probably not exist. Most, if not all of the projects
developed here will have their source code released under open source
licences, and we will be hoping to build voluntary development
communities around all our projects. However, we feel that the
track-record of the voluntary development community when it comes to
developing socially focussed tools with off line impacts is perhaps
less than it might be. There are all sorts of reasons for this, but
the upshot is that we feel that a supportive structure and perhaps
some paid key developers are crucial to innovation in a sector which
is a terra incognita for many in the open source world. After all,
even Linus Torvalds had the security of his academic studies to pay
the bills...