On 10/14/05, John Smith devel8421@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.