J5’s Blog

One of my biggest pet peeves is this argument:

You’ve done ***************** this much “good” so you are obligated to do more (and to my benefit first). If you don’t do so the world will implode.

I especially hate it when the person making that argument benefits from that good but doesn’t think they should contribute to it.

I do however agree with this argument:

You have done ******************* this much “good” and as a result have benefited from that good on average more than others, you have an obligation to keep putting in as much as you can. I am a beneficiary of your good and will try to add to it but I may lack the ability to contribute in any meaningful way.

On the philosophical side:

Is it more moral to get paid for the above arguments’ “good”, which frees you up to do more of the “good” or to do something else for a living with results being the scope of your “good” contributions are less than they would have been?

Those questions I don’t think there is a real answer to.

And no Spot, I’m not going to suddenly quit, I just sometimes wonder why I chose to be a public free software developer when it means I have to deal with anonymous idiots or break my own moral code on censorship.

Ah the recent spate of technology bashing reminds me of when D-Bus, Hal and udev were young and inexperienced.  Many people yearned for the days of automounter, cried bloody murder when Wine couldn’t find their cdrom and their favourite command line tool just couldn’t grok the new device syntax.

What’s that? The technology matured and now people would rise up in arms if we ever reverted to the old days? To be fair we do try not to break things but some things are broken already and are being barely held together by dead kittens and fairy dust.

As I said when we completely broke D-Bus to move to the new wire protocol (0.2x-0.3x) – sure there are growing pains involved but in time people will just get on with their lives and it will become another layer of the system that nobody cares about because it just works. It pays to take the time to fix things right even if there will be pain in between.

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