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> It means that someone has just donated hundreds of hours of work for you. Free of charge! I think that misses something of the ethos of free software. It's n
by jancsika 9y ago
> It means that someone has just donated hundreds of hours of work for you. Free of charge!
I think that misses something of the ethos of free software. It's not like somebody donating their valuable time to work in a soup kitchen. It's much more like somebody too lazy to spend thirty seconds doing a menial task like everyone else, so they instead spend three months creating a program that automates that thirty second task-- with the side effect that the rest of computer-using humanity gets out of doing that menial task, too.
So in a way it does require a thank you. But in another way releasing it as free software is the least they could do given all the time they wasted just to get out of doing work.
- detaro 9y agoI wonder what "30s menial task" the writers of Apache, the Linux kernel, Blender, … tried to avoid?
- jacalata 9y agoThat is a bizarre attitude. Why would anyone owe you for having wasted their own time? I mean, if you were arguing that they owed it to their employer to give them anything developed on company time, at least you'd make sense...
- makecheck 9y agoI for one have spent over 20 years continually expanding my application, as free GPL software, and I stopped counting the hours long ago. It is a gigantic amount of effort to design non-trivial software. Heck, just keeping everything stable and up-to-date is a project in itself (periodically having to adopt modern platform APIs, for instance). And usually I receive very little feedback. I can see downloads in the thousands and I doubt I've had more than a few E-mails a year. You might be misled by the tendency for people to hack random things together and dump them on GitHub, never to be touched again.