ISP offers students cash for open source code
As an incentive to get students to push the code boundaries of open source software, a British software network is offering cash for fresh code, reports Welsh IT News Online.
The UK Free Software Network (UKFSN), a small Hertfordshire-based Internet service provider, concieved the idea to encourage students to develop software that can be modified by its end users.
Andrew Price, a computer science student at Swansea University, is the first person to be awarded £4,680 to further the code of the free software movement.
"There's a lot of work to be done," Price, a former president of the university's computer society, told Ping Wales. "A constraint I have to follow is the GNU Free Software Definition."The UKFSN programme will allow me to carry on contributing to free software in my spare time instead of having to get a typical dead-end student job that would be far less fulfilling; now I can treat it like a fun job and not just a fun hobby.
Free software advocates believe application code should be open to tweaking by others in the development community and has gained an increasingly large audience.
"Many universities and colleges have a long history of involvement in free software projects as experience has shown that these provide invaluable benefit to both the student and the academic institution. It also occurred to me that students in this country are increasingly being squeezed financially," said UKFSN's Jason Clifford.
UKFSN, a top-ranked British service provider, is funding software projects from the profits of its Internet service provision business.