Frank W. Zammetti wrote:

On Fri, March 17, 2006 9:15 am, Ted Husted said:

Anytime anyone says something like "I don't want to do this work
unless it's going to be accepted to the distribution", then the first
thing I think is that this person is volunteering for the wrong
reasons, and, if so, it would be better if they didn't volunteer to do
the work.


I used to say this sort of thing, but I have come to see your point here
and largely agree.

However, you seem to leave room for another possibility, by using the
phrase "if so" here, and I think that's good, because I don't think it's
an either-or proposition... For example, I don't think I've ever said
"tell me this will be accepted or I won't do it", but certainly I've
looked for support for an idea among committers before putting in effort,
and I don't see this as a problem.  Someone can want to contribute out of
an altrusitic mindset, want to see a project move forward in a certain way
out of a desire to do good, and for them it might be perfectly valid to
not want to wind up wasting their time doing something that was never
going to be accepted.

Not all good ideas come from scratching an itch is my point.  I think it's
fair to be weary of an idea not born of that, but it doesn't automatically
make it a bad idea, and it doesn't automatically mean the person doesn't
have good/non-selfish intentions at heart.

I agree with what you say but I thought that I'd point out that open source projects are successful for their code and not their ideas. So a person may have a fabulous idea but if they aren't going to use the code themselves then it is likely to be of lower quality than something similar that someone is going to use. It's not universally true but the phrase "eating your own dog food" didn't come from nowhere. :)

"Scratching an itch" implies that not only does one have an idea but they have a use-case that their idea solves... which means their solution will probably be more than a sketch of a good idea. And it's something that they'd want to maintain.

-Paul


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