On Wednesday 20 February 2002 01:16 am, Daniel Stone wrote: > On Wed, Feb 20, 2002 at 12:27:25AM -0800, ben wrote: > > just give it up. redeem yourself (if, indeed, you have any intent to do > > so) by conceding that the only necessary obligation--in this case, of > > gratitude and respect owed by the benficiaries of the unpaid labor of > > others--exists on the side of the users towards the maintainers, and not > > the other way around. > > While I appreciate your support, sometimes I think you overplay the > maintainers' stocks a little bit. :) > > When we take on a package, we take on the responsibility of maintaining > it ... given, we might not be able to do an absolute perfect job, but we > did say we'd do a job, and so we should always endeavour to do it, when > reasonable. > given that the product of your willingness to take on those responsibilities results in a pure win for those of us who reap the benefit, it just plain pisses me off when some arrogant asshole tries to assert an obligation on your (collective) part solely in order to assauge his solely personal interests at the expense of according appreciation where it's deserved. as someone who accrues the benefit of your work, at absolutely no cost to myself, it seems to me that the least i can do, in return, is to bring that fool's attention to the idea that his attitude is pitiable.
along with that, i'd like to add that you may not be aware of the fact that there are a whole big lot of people out here who are, really, just plain users, who don't necessarily have any other ambition than to run a small home or office system that might even do nothing other than give us the freedom to revel in our (debian-enabled) supremely functional independence of ms'ed up operating systems. from your humble response, it kinda sounds like not enough of us have been showing up to say thanks. that's really all that this is about. kde is primarily a single user oriented environment, and, as far as i know, none of the maintainers have commited themselves to any responsibility beyond that, such as to specifically accommodate enterprise or even development oriented interests--not that you neglect those users, either. but, consequently, the majority of those who gain by your efforts are the regular folks who have made--given the context of their origin as discouraged windon't users--a comparable effort in risking all that was familar, however repugnant, to embrace a system where, rightly, there is no-one to blame but oneself in the event of any of the common usage problems that might arise. nonetheless, you guys continually cover our asses, getting us, as solidly as you can, back up when we thought that we were down. that, to my mind, deserves far more appreciation than scorn. if that's too much, sorry. ben