[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread] 

List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Allow money donations for precise bugs
From:       Waldo Bastian <bastian () kde ! org>
Date:       2005-03-13 22:54:23
Message-ID: 200503132354.27854.bastian () kde ! org
[Download RAW message or body]

[Attachment #2 (multipart/signed)]


[Insults first...]
> > > oh, you also might want to think about the getting personally
> > > insulting part.
> >
> > *think* Your father must have mistaken the whore that calls herself
> > your mother for a goat. In that regard it's positive that you were
> > named after your mother, and not Goatmann after your father ;-)
>
> see that line over there?
> thats the fine line between discussion and flaming. and you just
> overstepped it. by miles.

Yes, if you flame you have to do it right. I wasn't aware there was a 
discussion going on actually. I just found this thread an amusing way to 
spend my free sunday afternoon, it was either amusing myself in this thread 
or doing some bug reports. But I guess my attempt at improving my personal 
insult skills wasn't as funny as I thought, I admit to having a strange kind 
of humor, so I would like to apologize for that to you and your family.

> besides, it basically says "omg i ran out of sensible things to say"
> when you resort to insults.

No, it was a reaction to your suggestion to think about getting personally 
insulting.

On Sunday 13 March 2005 20:05, Mathias Homann wrote:
> Am Sonntag, 13. März 2005 19:29 schrieb Waldo Bastian:
> > *think* Yes, I still think it's a good idea. You see, KDE will be
> > able to sustain itself just fine without users, while it will not
> > last a single day without developers. So when it comes to choosing
> > between scaring away developers and scaring away users, the choice
> > is rather easy actually.
>
> checked that opinion with your employer?

No, that is my personal opinion as it relates to KDE as an open source 
project.

> who was that again, suse?

Well, it's good that you mention my employer. My employer actually cares about 
its paying (!) customers. And when my employer gets the impression that a 
significant part of its paying customers would like to have a certain 
feature, it will direct paid developers (like me) to implement those 
features. It does that in the hope to get that investment repaid in the form 
of increased product sales.

Note the difference here between a commercial linux vendor, for whom paying 
customers are essential to its business and whose primary goal is to make 
profit, and an open source project, which has no profit motive whatsoever, 
does not have paying customers and has only a small amount of financial 
expenses.

> which DE is default on suse linux?

You can chose between Gnome and KDE as default :-)

> > I'm not sure why you use kmail as example btw, there is exactly one
> > KDE developer that I know of who accepts payments for adding
> > features, and that is a KMail developer, see
> > http://www.kontact.org/shopping/sanders.php
>
> yea, and exactly the one bugzilla entry i was referring to is the one
> that sits in bugzilla as assigned to exactly that person, yet he
> basically says "i wont do it until i get money for it" on his page.

Ok, so why don't you pay him then?

> So, if some people here oppose to paying for features, shouldnt the
> same people see that this bugzilla item gets assigned to someone
> else?

Those same people just don't care for the feature. You seem to care, you have 
the ability to pay the kmail developer to get it done, yet you don't do so. 
If anything, it proves that this whole idea of "let's buy features with 
symbolic amounts of money", just doesn't work. Unfortunately a lot of people, 
including you, aren't willing to accept that reality because they keep 
holding the mistaken believe that they have a right to demand that others 
write software for them for an amount far below fair market value. You don't 
have that right and it is extremely rude to think you do.

I understand where the confusion comes from though. On hand it comes from all 
round confusion about the term "free software" which people keep associating 
with "free beer", this isn't surprising because "free software" often comes 
as "free beer". It doesn't stop with that though, the harmfull part starts 
when people get the "free beer" and then think because the beer is free, they 
must certainly have a right to "free whiskey", "free wine" and "free 
spareribs" as well, and please hurry a bit because they don't want to wait 
all day. And sure, they understand that the whiskey costs 30 EUR a bottle in 
the shop, so here you have a 50ct tip and now better hurry because they paid 
for it. As I hope you realize by now, that's not how the free software cafe 
operates.

The other problem is that there are people who are really fed up with 
Microsoft's monopoly and would nothing better than to replace it with Linux 
and free software today. They like that to happen so much that they tell 
everyone that Linux and open source software is great and can solve all their 
problems. And in their enthusiasm they may get a little bit overboard and 
exagerate a little bit. Now the problem starts when someone who has been told 
that Linux can solve all his problems, then discovers that he happens to have 
a problem that it can't solve. He will get all angry because "they" told him 
it could solve all his problems, and then he goes to "kde-devel@kde.org" to 
complain about it and he finds "developers" that make software because that 
happens to be what they like to spend their sunday afternoon on. And these 
"developers" shrug and think he is a loony because they never told him that 
their software would solve all his problems. At first this seems very strange 
till you realize that the "they" who told you about Linux yesterday may not 
be the same as the "developers" that you talk with today. And most (but not 
all, take me for example) of these "developers" are fairly reasonable and are 
quite sympathetic to your situation and may be able to help you, but in the 
end they don't owe you anything and it is still all about how they spend 
their free sunday afternoon that you are talking about.

Now, don't get me wrong, I really appreciate the fact that people advocate 
linux and KDE to the masses, after all it would be a waste to have great 
software around if nobody knows about it, but you need to be aware of the 
realities of the process that creates the software. It's a bit like the fairy 
tale about the goose that laid golden eggs, you need to keep the goose 
healthy and happy to benefit from the eggs. Throwing euros at it doesn't help 
if all it wants is love and care.

Cheers,
Waldo

[Attachment #5 (application/pgp-signature)]

>> Visit http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-devel#unsub to unsubscribe <<


[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread]