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Raleigh, NC
Ruth Suehle is the community leadership manager for Red Hat's Open Source and Standards team. She's co-author of Raspberry Pi Hacks (O'Reilly, December 2013) and a senior editor at GeekMom, a site for those who find their joy in both geekery and parenting. She's a maker at heart who is often behind a sewing machine creating costumes, rolling fondant for an excessively large cake, or looking for the next great DIY project.
Authored Comments
Thanks, Forest! Got it fixed.
I'll be devil's advocate, just because I don't hate the word crowdsourcing as much as you do.
First of all, your stated "true" benefit of being a Linux developer is that you see your code and the features that you wanted in the product. But if your code doesn't make it in, now you're just everybody else. You're the designer whose logo didn't get used. You've got the same copy of Linux everybody else has, without your work in it.
But that's OK, because I don't think what you're considering lost work is completely lost in either case. I can't prove it, but I'd be willing to bet that a significant percentage of those 99designs designers are students and entry-level people who need to build portfolios. Sure, it helps to be able to say you made this for a company, but even if it wasn't used, you still made it. It's better than nothing. You may have learned a new technique in the process. And if it really was good, but not what that client wanted, you may be able to repurpose some of it later.
Finally, why are you making this out to be a choice? It's not like only open source or only crowdsourcing can exist. There's room for both of them in the world. It's a matter of which process works better for the problem at hand. You simply cannot have 100 people designing a logo. But you can have 100 people create logo ideas and use the best one.