Re: Bashing freelancers

From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
Date: Mar 7, 2015, 11:48 UTC
Message-ID: <87fv9hni43.fsf@fencepost.gnu.org>
In-Reply-To: <xmqq8uf9ye4e.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

Show 20 quoted lines

> David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:
>>
>>> David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:
>>>
>>>> Good work is worth good money. Suggesting that people who are not able
>>>> to work for free are morally inferior is not conducive for a cooperative
>>>> work atmosphere.
>>>
>>> Yes, but I do not think anybody did any such thing.
>>
>> "Of course, I am hoping that all the mentors are doing GSoC not for
>> money but out of love of our software and our community,"
>>
>> Huh.
>
> I did not intend any moral judgement in that statement, but after
> re-reading it, I would say that "not for money" would have been
> better phrased as "not only for money".

Shrug. "love of our software and our community" was not sufficient in the thread started at <http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/255385> to make anybody do a one-character change spelled out explicitly even after the user, presumably a "community" member, begged again. Presumably a case of "Somebody else's problem".

The reality is that developers work mostly for their own motivations, what Linus Torvalds describes as "scratching your own itch". And not everybody is in the situation where he is able to scratch his own itch.

Sometimes there are good scratchers whose main itch is that everybody is of the opinion they are so excellent at scratching people's itches that they have the moral obligation to not do anything else.

Like eating.  Or sleeping.  Or having a life.

The non-glorious part of maintaining a flea circus where you can say "jump" and marvel at inhuman feats of strength is feeding time. You can't just hope to shake down some passing dog whenever it is performance time: even if that works, some of your actors may be too starved to perform well.

Well, a flea circus is probably a bad analogy when talking about scratching one's own itches. But it's easy to state that one wants people to work for love when oneself is getting paid for it.