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To be frank, I completely disagree, and I get the feeling that so do most people, actually. We don't call it "work" because it's pleasant and fun. I see this
by eli_gottlieb 11y ago
To be frank, I completely disagree, and I get the feeling that so do most people, actually. We don't call it "work" because it's pleasant and fun. I see this as someone who finds his job genuinely engaging and almost, though not quite, a benefit to society, and whose alternate career paths would potentially involve more benefit to society and even more engagement in my work. My job would actually be fun if not for the unpleasant necessities involved in treating it as business that actually has to ship a product some day, which is of course exactly what makes it at all useful to society and not just a shared team hobby.
Of course, the alternate career path would also involve significantly longer hours for significantly lower pay (ie: going back into academia), which brings us right back around to the point that it's called work because you don't like doing so damn much of it.
Also, it really would have helped to segment out the statistics by income and education levels. Remember, the arithmetic average of a power-law distribution does not make sense.
- Bartweiss 11y agoThe point about segmenting is big. I was absolutely baffled to see "people can't afford to move for work" answered by "the typical household is more mobile". That's not the same thing! The typical household isn't involuntarily unemployed, which is what we're talking about in the first place!
- Qantourisc 11y agoFOSS still ships, why wouldn't your team ?
- AstralStorm 11y agoOne in how many projects ships? And of those, how many are actually useful and useable? Scratching the itch goes only so far.
- marcosdumay 11y agoEasy there or we might discover that FOSS numbers are better than enterprise ones. There's a very low bar to pass, and FOSS is going back into the UNIX's small software philosophy[1]. Scratching an itch may likely go far enough. [1] Yes, sometimes too small. Maybe we need new kinds of consolidation projects.
- nvdk 11y agoMost successful FOSS projects are backed by companies who have employees work on them. I would love to see some statistics on pure "hobby FOSS" vs "commercial FOSS" and their deliverables. Based on my own experience I would say most hobby FOSS projects ship a lot less frequently than the commercial FOSS projects.