Re: What is annoying in the flattr buttons?
]] Michael Gilbert
Hi,
| On Fri, 12 Nov 2010 17:27:08 +0100, Tollef Fog Heen wrote:
|
| > You don't think so. I do. One of the reasons is it puts a, IMO too
| > low value on other, similar work, so by taking petty donations for
| > small pieces of work, you are lowering the value of my work too.
| > Lowering the value of the work your codevelopers are doing is, IMO,
| > rude. I realise that's not the intention of asking for money, but
| > the effect is there.
|
| How can you possibly reduce the monetary value of volunteer work? Or
| more inquisitively, how is it even feasible to assign a price to such
| work in the first place?
I did not write monetary value, I wrote value.
By not assigning a monetary value to the work, it gets valued by its
usefulness (or prettyness or whatever). Once you assign a monetary
value to it, the non-monetary value gets in the background because
people will use the monetary value as a proxy for its non-monetary
value.
Let me make a simile, which like all similes are not perfect, but might
get my point across, since it seems people find it hard to understand:
Assume you are helping a friend move house. They offer you €2 for the
work. Would you be happy? I'd be insulted, since what they're doing is
assigning a very low value on your work, rather than just saying «Thanks
a lot for the help» afterwards. If they just said «Thank you», the
value they put on your work and thereby how appreciated you feel will be
higher.
| […] According to your argument, all of Debian's volunteers are doing
| the world a major disservice in actively preventing a potential $13
| billion in revenue from infusing into the economy. How cruel!?
I'm not sure how you got to that conclusion at all. Also, I would
believe a fair amount of the upstream (and Debian) development is done
by people paid to do that work, so surely that number should be
smaller.
Regards,
--
Tollef Fog Heen
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are
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