Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
Open-source is an industry when there are people paid to participate in
the process, including people paid to listen to user tantrums.
It's my understanding that the vast majority, like 90+%, of the
programming effort for OOo is performed by paid employees of
corporations like Sun, IBM, RedHat, etc. Probably much more of the stuff
like documentation and localizations is done by volunteers.
What interests me is what you consider a "user tantrum".
Open-source is a hobby when people contribute gratis pro deo and have
little time and inclinaison to do the same kind of user knowtowing they
do at work.
So which is it for this project? And since your name doesn't come up on
the contributors list, what does it matter to you?
BTW, it sounds to me like you really hate your job. You should consider
getting a different one.
When you buy StarOffice, or Red Hat Entreprise Linux, you do not get the
same service than when you download OpenOffice.org or Fedora Linux for
nothing. Nevertheless they are essentially the same technical FOSS
products. The main difference is only suits paid to listen to consumers
and bark "yes sir" at the right time no matter how they are addressed.
I've seen very few OPs exhibit a really bad attitude. Maybe one or two a
week. But those are on the user question list, which I've never seen you on.
Current western societies have little patience for politeness. You pay
for a product, and buy the right to yell at the call center ("customer
is king" and such crapola. Difficult to address one another as decent
persons in this ideological context)
Is THAT your job? No wonder you hate people. Retail will do the same
thing to you.
However if you think any normally constituted human being is ready to do
call center duty for free ("satisfy the consumer demand" as you
euphimisticaly write it) particularly on FOSS mailing lists where the
average technical level and income is light-years from call-center
level, you are sadly mistaken.
I'm talking about consumer demand in the economic sense as in "demand
and supply", not the getting in your face and yelling at you sort of demand.
But unlike you, I actually volunteer some effort (not nearly as much as
some people) on the user list answering questions. I just ignore the
ones that yell. And I guess I take an open-source attitude about it,
because I tend to answer the questions that I find interesting and
ignore the rest, rather than doing the hard lifting of answering all the
"I can't get this to install" type of stuff.
--
Rod
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