I suggest that you go back to your normal policy of ignoring Dvorak's
existence. He is a columnist, not a journalist. The primary purpose of his
writing is more to incite audience response than convey useful information,
as he says in an exchange we had in January:
I do comment on this too, but it never has the broad appeal of
carping over some personal grievance in some new way. Some other
poster mentioned that page views regarding this column is all I'm
after. As opposed to what? Nobody reading? As comic Rob Becker once
said regarding the fact that a lot of women go for jerks as
boyfriends. "If there was no demand, there would be no supply!"
----
In fact I'm looking for the insight of the audience. If you call
that trolling, then so be it. Why is this bad?
> "OSS is an important effort to replace 'for-profit' motives (with it's
> material rewards) with 'for-ego' motives
> "Vanity is the driving force behind OSS, as is greed behind
> closed-source
> software. Try to use someone's OSS code without attributing original
> authorship [...]
FWIW, James, Avalon and other projects recently decided to remove the
@author tags from the source files. There was some disagreement in the
Avalon list, there was none on the James list. We do try to give people
recognition in the CVS commit logs, change summaries, and the We Are page.
Personally, the OSS projects I've worked on were ones where I needed the
code to do something it didn't, and working on it was the most expedient way
of getting what I needed. For example, when we needed a functional JSP
engine, a bunch of us worked on GNUJSP. Eventually tomcat improved, and the
JSP specification grew, to the point where it was easier to switch to tomcat
than to keep enhancing GNUJSP.
There may also be profit potential for those companies that provide
customization or support for OSS projects.
One could point out the issues to Dvorak, but what is the point of debating
with an chameleon whose only care is for audience reaction rather than
intellectual honesty? Let other people feed the troll.
--- Noel
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