Monique Y. Mudama wrote:
On 2006-04-23, Kevin Mark penned:
[some snippage]
In this context, free software user can never buy the software from
a company because their is no company and their is no legal monetary
contact between Debian and its developers and thus no one can make
the free software developers do anything. The free software model
does allow a free market whereby any other developer can be paid or
convinced to do what you want.
But it seems the free software developers are usually simply
'scratching their itch' to their satisfaction and others may or may
not like the result. And the average users is more or less
powerless to force the free software developer to listen to them
sans forking over money and the developers accepting a contract to
do what they want.
When you say that the average user is powerless to force the free
software developer to listen to them, I'm wondering what you're
comparing this experience to. Have you ever, as an average user, been
able to convince a commercial software company to do something for
you? I'd love to hear about it, because that hasn't been my
experience.
Well, I've been on the other end of this particular stick, both
working for "large corporations", and running a "small business"
(I and one other guy in a garage writing software; you can find
some of our ads in the back of Byte magazine in 1986 or so,
under the name Kydor).
Everyone in every company I have worked for was acutely aware that
satisfied customers were our paychecks, and all but the slackers
(all large corporations have these) worked hard to keep our customers
satisfied. And that was not the only motivation... Most of the
engineers were also motivated by pride of ownership. Some, sadly,
were really in the wrong career, putting in their hours and going
home. But most were excited about their jobs. Most were doing what
they did because they like to solve challenging puzzles.
I don't understand why the idea of spending money to get an open
source solution seems, apparently, unreasonable to you. I'm grateful
for all of the free (as in beer) open source software I'm able to use.
But as a developer, I'd get mighty P.O.'ed if someone told me I "had"
to code something. Offer me money, and I might accept. (Note: I'm
not a debian developer. I don't mean that anyone should offer me
money to write something for debian, although if enough money were
offered, I might consider it *grin*.)
I am sure that each one working on any distro of Linux has his
own motivations for doing so.
Mike
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