[conspire] Speculation on derivatives won't save your freedom (was: ...Flattr...)

[Don Marti]

begin Nick Moffitt quotation of Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 08:19:04PM +0000:
> Don Marti:
> > begin Nick Moffitt quotation of Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 04:39:05PM +0000:
> > > Oh, I'm sure the distribution that operated it would smile
> > > beatifically and hold its hands in the air and say "but all we do is
> > > bring people together!" while speculators hyped up the importance of
> > > irrelevant bugs they knew a special fix for.  Consider the security
> > > fix where a coder waits for lucrative hysteria to build before
> > > releasing the patch!
> > 
> > How often could you do that before losing users or kicking off a fork?
> > A pure speculator might hype an insignificant or invalid bug, but a
> > maintainer with time invested in learning the software would be
> > unlikely to reduce the future market by pulling stunts.
> 
> If it's a big-name distro?  Rather a long time, I'd say.  That said,
> this kind of dynamic could accelerate the nerdrage disillusionment with
> any successful distribution, pushing masses of unprepared novices toward
> obscure blink-and-you-miss-them white-box projects.

Or slow it down.  What if the "Linux will never
succeed for small businesses unless you fix this"
argument would just peter out if the bug had a market
cap of $4?

> What's more, you're taking the answer to "why is my work-stopping
> critical bug not fixed?" from "because we actually have more critical
> bugs in the works that we feel are more likely to yield fixes" to
> "because it is NOT WHAT THE MARKET WILL BEAR".  Party time in alienation
> city!

Dude, that already happens, just at a larger scale.
You just get semi-abandonware whose maintainer has
to put in more time on paying projects.

-- 
Don Marti                    
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
dmarti at zgp.org