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So that you can turn my answer into another ad hominem attack? No, I don't think I will.

• rglullis 6y ago
  What ad hominem? It's not about you or your character. I am not trying to argue that your "belief" is right or wrong. This is up to you. What I am asking is "how strongly are you willing to stand behind your belief?" It's a simple filter to check if you will continue to hold your belief if it costs you something to defend it. It's just a test of Skin in the Game.
  • ohazi 6y ago
    > Show some willingness to put skin in the game, otherwise all your "beliefs" are nothing but hot air. This felt like an ad hominem. I was making a case for the existence of people who choose to write software for principled reasons rather than for money. How much extra money I have to personally throw at a project doesn't change this number of people, since they're (by definition) not doing it for the money. But you seem to think that me not having enough skin in the game is justification for dismissing my argument as hot air. I don't think that justification holds. --- I'm sorry, I'm not really mad, I'm mostly just frustrated with where this conversation has gone. Would I support such a project? Yeah, I'd probably throw a few bucks at them, like I've occasionally done in the past with Mozilla, with other projects, and with individual software developers who wrote tools that I like. Would my meager contributions make or break the project? Obviously not. Are you going to argue that the sum total contributions from people like me will likely amount to less than one engineer's salary, and therefore the project is doomed? You can make that argument if you want -- I don't agree with it. Look, this is the kind of thing we're talking about: https://twitter.com/CohanRobinson/status/1364172683118866433 https://twitter.com/CohanRobinson/status/1364172683118866433 I think it's bullshit and don't want that in my browser. I bet you probably don't like it very much either. The only thing I was trying to argue in response to your questions essentially boils down to "people have gotten angry and forked some pretty major projects for far less than this." ffmpeg and libav Debian and Devuan over systemd ...etc. It just doesn't seem too far fetched to me to think that some person / people might feel incensed and motivated enough about this change to create a de-crap-ified Firefox fork, even if they weren't getting paid. That's all.
    • rglullis 6y ago
      The point that I'm trying to make here is that even the projects ran by "people who are incensed and motivated enough about this change" need to have the upstream going and be continuously supported. If you say "we can get rid of crappy technology" but you still need the crappy technology to be used by the absolute majority of users, are "we" really getting rid of it? To get "rid" of the crappy technology, "we" must go beyond this piggybacking. "We" need to put resources into an alternative. "We" must ensure that are enough people working on it to satisfy the needs of the majority, not just our own. And unless you are really invested into defending this ideal to the point of sacrificing yourself (or your money/time/resources), you will have to make compromises. For Mozilla, this is coming as sponsored links. For Brave, this is coming as a business model that still deals with ad distribution (although in a model that the users also benefit from it and that are not tracked). You can complain and wish it was different all you want, but at the end of the day the truth is that these compromises do not bother "the community" to the point where they would pay to keep an alternative business around.