Your work is amplified through the action of the corporation. This isn't just true of software developers but even repetitive manual labor on an assembly line is amplified through the co-operation of the group or corporation. Your compensation for this behavior is reduced risk, that is to say the corporation assumes the risk around your quality of work. So they basically pay you or someone else to fix problems you create.
A carpenter, brick-layer, whoever doing a one-off job is doing that job under the assumption that they bear the risk of quality work directly, and they do typically charge more for it. Maybe a good example is: if you've used a plumbing company with many plumber employees you'll find the plumbers are paid a wage rather than per job. That wage is typically less that the plumbers might be able to earn working on their own but the company offers some guarantees to it's employees, and the difference in wages is acceptable to the employee because they get reduced uncertainty of income and the work quality risk is assumed by the company - essentially shared among the other employees (somewhat) and shareholders (mostly).

It would be nice if the posted article or even the OpenZFS project home page provided some sort of summary of the benefits and objectives of this effort.

"The author is quick to note that he has no philosophical disagreements with GNU or the FSF." - oh so he's a heretic not apostate, thank Linus! But get the pyre going anyway.

No one knows what they really need to learn to do a job until they've done it for a while. Go out and get a job as close to what you want as possible. Then in 18months think about college again.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
J.

Climate scientists are funded by the money they scare up, I mean, solicit for their own expertise to fight the process they are experts in. And yet we don't apply the same standards of conflict of interest to them because they are on the 'right side'?

In money terms M$ is winning, isn't it? Linux has helped other firms (Oracle-Sun etc.) maintain their relevance. How much revenue they would actually ascribe to it is, probably artificially low but still not M$ amounts. Maybe that's the problem since it's free it's not recorded how much value it is supporting? Another angle is how many programmers earn their living writing for M$ v's Linux?

Couldn't this post have started "Google releases improved video codec ..." or whatever a PNSR improved VP8 is? Really, just a hint at the topic in the first sentence would improve slashdot 'readability'.

Ehh ... this wasn't obvious? Why do you think they hold a competition? Because it's cheaper than funding the effort directly.

Random suggestion: Can you print the data out in text format and then OCR it into a new machine?

Why is astronomy layman reporting (and global warming, and meteor science) all about the extreme case? Only so many characters in the headline field? Too much character in the headline writer? Thing is you're wearing out the reader - in a few more generations the only way for this story to get noticed will be "Aliens From Orion On Their Way To Eat You".

Well, seeing as the most exciting or at least slashdot worthy scientific result posted here was about microbes being possibly more virulent in space my guess is ISSv2 isn't exactly a high priority. See this month's Scientific American magazine. Couldn't the money be given to orphans or Google or someone instead?