Belated Thanks to Sun Open Source Folks!
I feel bad for it taking this long to write a simple "Thank You" blog entry, but better late than never. So: Thank You dear Sun Microsystems, for the nice GlassFish Awards Program (GAP)! Special thanks to the folks who pushed through to get GAP itself approved; among many other worthy candidate projects.
In addition to liking the idea of such awards in general, I am of course somewhat biased (or at least, extra thankful?) by the fact that I was fortunate enough to be among the lucky winners -- Pardon my bias (I am especially proud of this mention!). Participation was based on submitting a few SJSXP bug reports, some accompanied by patches (and as I have mentioned earlier, one getting released as part of JDK 1.6 updates).
It is nice to get something back for doing things inder category "I would have done it anyway, things that I keep on doing even-more-so, because of this serendipitous (sp?) awards program". :-)
I think this also underlines one of lesser-known rules of using money as motivational tool: it should not be used as the motivator for getting work done ("if you do X, I pay you Y") -- that is actually counter-productive, as thoroughly proven over the years (it essentially removes motivation to do X, UNLESS Y is paid: even if originally no such motivator was needed!) -- but rather, to reward things that one wants to see more of. This hopefully has the benefit of boosting morale without accidentally assigning a "price tag" for voluntary work.
At any rate: thank you Sun, let's do this again some time!
