Re: Valuing non-code contributions -- was Re: systemd - so much energy wasted in quarreling
On Tue, 11 Nov 2014, Erwan David wrote:
> Le 11/11/2014 18:59, Don Armstrong a écrit :
> > When I (or someone else) asks people to "show us the code", it's
> > really just shorthand for "someone needs to do this work, and it
> > currently isn't important enough for me to do it."
>
> Asking to provide a patch to an utterly complex code is just
> [complete] [nonsense] and [hypocrisy]: one cannot patch any complex
> software without working on it for long hours.
While it might take less time for someone intimately familiar with a
piece of code to provide a patch, it still may take a lot of time for
them to provide the patch. The actual cost may be even higher even
though it takes less time, because writing a patch means that they're
not working on something else.
It's the reality of Free Software that people work on things that they
want to work on. If something is important to you, but not important
enough for you to do it, then your next best alternative is to figure
out how you can best encourage someone else to do it for you. Calling
people hypocrites isn't a very effective way to do that.
> And when the probleme is te basic design of the software a patch is
> not conceivable.
Then the solution is to become involved in the software design process.
--
Don Armstrong http://www.donarmstrong.com
6: If we are one, then we can defeat 2.
-- "The Prisoner (2009 Miniseries)" _Schizoid_
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