[Sussex] Thoughts On Contrubuting to the Community

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

Vic wrote:
>>> This is Free Software. There is no "payment".
>>>       
>> There as been much written on the fact that contributions of effort
>> are a form of payment.
>>     
>
> I've no idea where you're going with that argument, but it bears no
> relationship whatsoever to anything I wrote.
>
> There is no payment from end-user to originator because this is Free
> Software. Dress your arguments up any which way you like, play whatever
> semantic games you will, but that fact remains; an end-user owes nothing
> whatsoever to the authors of a piece of FLOSS code in return for its use.
>   
Whoa! Whoa! Calm down, folks. This is being unnecessarily tense.

Much of the "payment" to the open source movement is like the 
"contributions" box outside a public museum. It's voluntary, but the 
museum often couldn't operate without those contributions. For those who 
are without resources of time and money and expertise, they're welcome 
to enjoy what we've built. For those with resources, we encourage and 
even expect some contribution. An occasional freeloader is OK, but if 
you show up and start trashing exhibits or taking up the whole building 
and don't help cover the costs of staff to run the place, it will close. 
So both gratitude and enlightened self interest encourage contributions. 
These include the *massive* contributions of the people who create whole 
new wings of the museum (such as the authors of gcc, Emacs, X11, the 
Linux kernel, sendmail, etc., etc., etc.)

So you can legally visit the museum with your noisy kids and check out 
the cool stuff. But if you don't contribute, well, that museum may not 
be there next summer when it's a hot day and you need that indoor place 
to bring the kids. Or it won't have air-conditioning and won't be 
tolerable in August, so you and they will miss a good place to learn 
something cool.

And receiving a kindness or courtesy from others creates a *social* 
debt, if not a legal one. If you don't treat such courtesies with 
respect and return them in kind, or at least pass them along to others, 
people will waste that much more effort hiring their own movers and 
tutors and babysitters, instead of having this amazing resource for all.