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Everytime stuff like this comes up, I think of Cory Doctorow's excellent essay, "All Complex Ecosystems have Parasites" http://craphound.com/complexecosystems.t
by josh2600 13y ago
Everytime stuff like this comes up, I think of Cory Doctorow's excellent essay, "All Complex Ecosystems have Parasites" http://craphound.com/complexecosystems.txt http://craphound.com/complexecosystems.txt
If you pave over your lawn when you get your first weed, you may never see the beautiful unexpected mutants that weed might create.
We wrestled a lot with this at 2600hz (and I think all open-source companies do). When your clients use your systems in ways you don't intend, you can shun them or embrace them. The latter tends to work quite well whereas the former only engenders bad feelings.
- wpietri 13y agoGreat point. My cautionary example for fighting people who use your system the "wrong" way is Friendster. If they had paid attention to their users, they could have been Facebook. But instead they put a lot of energy into banning people who were "doing it wrong". The way I try to look at it is that a company is supposed to be serving the users, not the other way around.