Reality check

[Dan Kegel]

On 10/14/05, John Smith <devel8421 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Hmmm... Out of 4 replies I've seen now 3 (or 75%) were about money. Which
> leads to the question - why _that_ many people in the wonderful world of
> OpenSource are obsessed with money?

John, you really need to chill out.

Free Software works like this:
  The programmers scratch their own itches.
That's it!  Users who have an itch not shared by any programmer
have no right to complain.   Don't look a gift horse in
the mouth, as they say.  If you *really* want a bug fixed,
and no programmer is willing to fix it for free,
and you can't fix it yourself, you have two choices:
1) wait for some programmer to decide he wants to fix
    it for his own reasons
2) pay a programmer to do it for you.

I'm a huge fan of Free Software and open source in general;
I've been writing it for twenty years now.   I'm not some
money-obsessed person.  I put in lots of time QA'ing
Wine, maintaining crosstool, and enhancing distcc.
Part of this is on my own time because I want to see
it happen, and part of it is because my employer needs
features (in e.g. crosstool or distcc).
People like me and like the Codeweavers folks
who are working our hearts out to
advance Wine really do *not* need to hear users
pout because their favorite bug isn't being fixed immediately.
(Users like that remind me of that girl in Willy Wonka and the
Chocolate Factory.)

OK., enough ranting for now.  Further complaints
about wine development to /dev/null, please.