stephan beal wrote:
This is a bit off topic, so feel free to tap Delete now, but i think everyone who uses and writes Free/Open Source Software should take a look at this:
http://64.71.152.24/index.html
i post it here mainly because of the number of "why won't you answer my question!?!?!" posts, and related immature and unappreciative behaviour which so often pops up here on this list. Reading that page, and the "background" page for that page:
http://64.71.152.24/original.html
might imbue some appreciation from the non-developers out there who so often DEMAND, without so much as a please or thank you, that FOSS developers solve the users' problems. It will certainly draw some sympathy from fellow FOSS developers who, like Paul, pay for domains and bandwidth out of their own pockets, and offer free support on their own time.
I dunno. I find his attitude dubious. I'm a sysadmin, not much of a programmer, but several years ago I wrote a little cpu/mem/etc monitor that sits in the old afterstep/windowmaker dock. It wasn't an earth shattering program, but it fulfilled my needs and used far less CPU than the others at the time while showing an awful lot of info in a small space. It got thousands of downloads and I saw that number as a craftsman: It was a praise of my little creation. I got a couple of thank you's, and two people that had ported it (one to FreeBSD, one to Solaris), but I didn't write it looking for thanks, nor would I have expected or even comprehended donations. This guy wanted money. He saw what he did as work that he deserved compensation for. This is the wrong attitude if you ever want to code Free Software. You have to think of yourself more of an artist than a bricklayer. If anyone writing free code has trouble hosting, just say so. There are dozens of universities with oodles of bandwidth with people that will gladly host your program, not to mention places like Sourceforge. Just say "Look, the bandwidth is too much, I can't afford to host it here", if the work was as in demand as his page suggests, he'll get plenty of offers in short order. You know why he got people whining about the GPL? Because he put up a PayPal link, and after he got the money, he'd then e-mail you a link to download it. Or you could download the binary-only for i386 directly. He then through a tantrum because most people just downloaded the binary. I can tell you honestly, there are two very valid reasons for this: 1) Anyone directed to that page would have absolutely no idea whether it worked or not. For all any of us know, he was peddling snake oil. 2) It's simpler. The vast majority of us will take the path of least resistance, rather than going through the paypal and waiting for an e-mail to eventually get the code, if you just put a link, people will gravitate to it. As the last nail in the "Whaa! I pay for bandwidth!", why didn't he simply release the source code patch? Even several thousand diff lines are tiny once gzip'd. So why did he choose this weird method? Because he WANTED it to fail. He wanted an excuse to throw a tantrum. You're right, in that developers are often underappreciated. Demands for support should simply be filed under the delete key. It costs nothing to simply ignore them. "If you have a problem, fix it yourself" is a cornerstone of open source.