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What does it mean when I say "successful freeware"?
40hz:
Still man...from freeware to Miyamoto...this thread has indeed gone a long way
-Paul Keith (February 14, 2011, 05:37 PM)
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indeed, it seems to have gone from being in danger of veering off topic to jumping the fence and running screaming into the trees ;D -Target (February 14, 2011, 08:18 PM)
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That tends to happen whenever Renegade joins the discussion. He raises all those Big Questions y'know? :P
(@Renegade - kidding...just kidding. :) )
Renegade:
Again... people are posting too fast for me... :D
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Why would it be a requirement? I can only see suspicion as the motivation.
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No offense (and sorry for butting in) but perhaps that stems from your own suspicion motivating you to be less transparent?
-Paul Keith (February 14, 2011, 07:52 PM)
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I think you're missing the point there.
My reasoning starts from a "blank slate" and assumes that there needs to be some motivation to take action. In this case, the action is opening things up.
If you're not doing anything bad, why would this ever occur to you other than as I stated, purely for interest sake. I was explicit about that:
Now I can see someone being open simply as a matter of fact/interest, but that's a very different thing
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I have NEVER opened anything up for any other reason. (See below.)
And I absolutely do not have any motivation to be less transparent. Go ahead and download all my software, scan it, and see that there is nothing malicious there.
I do have 1 piece of software that is potentially open to some abuse, and I have gone to great lengths to stop that:
http://renegademinds.com/Products/EmailAvenger/tabid/92/Default.aspx
No abuse
By downloading and using Email Avenger, you become responsible for what you use it for. It is meant as an EMERGENCY EMAIL UTILITY to help when you cannot use your email account.
You can enter any email address you like, so Email Avenger is a little open to abuse... So... to limit that, there is a footer at the bottom that links to Renegade Minds here and the number of emails you can send at 1 time is limited to 10 emails.
If you have received email threats from someone or outright inappropriate emails from someone using Email Avenger, there is nothing we can do. BUT, you can send the original email that includes all the email headers to your local police, ISP, or system administrator. They can take action against the culprit. Do not contact us about abuse. We cannot be responsible.
Tasteful pranks
Of course we all love jokes and harmless pranks... Please be responsible if you are sending emails with someone else's address. Also know that this may be illegal where you live and you may be open to prosecution if you do so. We are not responsible. Use common sense and keep things clean.
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That was written quite a few years ago when webmail outages were relatively common.
With respect to my own transparency, you should read here:
http://renegademinds.com/Home/About/tabid/61/Default.aspx
It's horribly out of date, but I believe that it should address any concerns about suspicions or nefarious activity on my part. The last paragraph there reads:
My goal here at Renegade Minds is to provide as many people as possible with as much value as I can. For some that's going to be a simple tutorial or a snippit of code. For others it's going to be software to improve their guitar or piano playing. Either way, I hope you enjoy Renegade Minds and take advantage of some of the things I've made available here.
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I didn't write any of that page thinking that I was under some scrutiny. It was simply an innocent attempt to deliver some information. That's a very different beast than trying to be transparent due to the shadow of suspicion being cast.
In that case then being less open would still be motivated by suspicion.
-Paul Keith (February 14, 2011, 07:52 PM)
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I didn't address anything about attempts to concel information. Again, that's an entirely different aspect. I was only trying to address the affirmative case of publishing information that is open and the negative case of inaction (potentially due to ignorance).
And according to you it's a burdened concept to be motivated by suspicion. So in the end, both spectrums, are burdened concept.
-Paul Keith (February 14, 2011, 07:52 PM)
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You're confusing the fourth case that you introduced into the previous cases.
0) Inaction (You're attaching the fourth case here)
1) Openness out of interest
2) Openness to dispel suspicion
3) Concealing information (i.e. The 4th case you introduced)
Attempting to hide things isn't something that is particularly interesting. i.e.:
Talking about the first (malicious authors) there is simply futile, as bad people will be bad, and there's nothing to be done about it.
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Ok... Let's put this in another light...
Why look a gift horse in the mouth?
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If someone is giving you something for free, it's pretty rude to demand that they tell you why they're doing it, what their motivations are, and that they have to "confess".
Flat out, it's just rude.
Why not just be gracious and say thank you?
I supposed that's my position in a super simple nutshell.
It's not uncommon to see freeware or open source projects die because the users continully bitch and complain and make unreasonable demands on the author(s).
Take NDOC for example. It was a fantastic piece of software, but...
http://weblogs.asp.net/bhouse/archive/2006/07/26/NDoc-2.0-_2D00_-R.I.P.aspx
I have decided to discontinue work on NDoc 2.0 and no longer participate in any open-source development work.
The development and release of NDoc 1.3 was a huge amount of work, and by all accounts widely appreciated. Unfortunately, despite the almost ubiquitous use of NDoc, there has been no support for the project from the .Net developer community either financially or by development contributions. Since 1.3 was released, there have been the grand total of eleven donations to the project. In fact, were it not for Oleg Tkachenko’s kind donation of a MS MVP MSDN subscription, I would not even have a copy of VS2005 to work with!
To put this into perspective, if only roughly 1-in-10 of the those who downloaded NDoc had donated the minimum allowable amount of $5 then I could have worked on NDoc 2.0 full-time and it could have been released months ago! Now, I am not suggesting that this should have occurred, or that anyone owes me anything for the work I have done, rather I am trying to demonstrate that if the community values open-source projects then it should do *something* to support them. MS has for years acknowledged community contributions via the MVP program but there is absolutely no support for community projects.
Once ‘Sandcastle’ is released, it is my belief that it will become the de-facto standard and that NDoc will slowly become a stagnant side-water. This will happen regardless of technical considerations, even if Sandcastle were to be less feature-complete. It's just an inevitable result of MS's 'not-invented-here' mentality, one only has to look at Nant and NUnit to see the effects of MS 'competition'.
This is not, however, my only reason for stopping development work - I have a big enough ego to think I could still produce a better product than them :-)
As some of you are aware, there are some in the community who believe that a .Net 2.0 compatible release was theirs by-right and that I should be moving faster – despite the fact that I am but one man working in his spare time...
This came to head in the last week; I have been subjected to an automated mail-bomb attack on both my public mail addresses and the ndoc2 mailing list address. These mails have been extremely offensive and resulted in my ISP temporarily suspending my account because of the traffic volume. This incident has been reported to the local authorities, although I am highly doubtful they will be able to do anything about it.
This has was the ‘last-straw’ and has convinced me that I should withdraw from the community; I’m not prepared to have myself and my family threatened by some lunatic!
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I've seen the same thing repeated elsewhere.
As a tool to sway suspicion, being open has 2 primary cases:
* The author is malicious and needs to convince visitors
* The author lives in a world where much is malicious, and needs to cut through the suspicion caused by malicious authors
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3rd primary case. People just want to know what they are getting. They want to know if they can become a fan of your product and you wouldn't screw them. They want to know if the developer is willing to disclose say... bugs that may turn people away from their product.
In turn, the more transparent a developer is, the more he gets in touch with the dilemma his users are having with his program be it bugs, confusing interface, self-bias resulting to poorer design. All which in turn leads to a developer being more incentivized to create a product that he is proud to share and show to his users which in turn leads to more transparency as then the developer would be more proud to showcase his hard work. Generically speaking of course.
-Paul Keith (February 14, 2011, 07:52 PM)
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I want to be clear -- I never said "don't be transparent". Transparency is a very good thing. What I said, in a nutshell, is demanding transparency when given a gift is unreasonable.
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Back in a bit...
Renegade:
It still seems that the underlying principle in your approach is to be suspicious. -Renegade (February 14, 2011, 07:23 PM)
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That is not at all what I'm saying. Suspicion has no place anywhere in this schema.
-40hz (February 14, 2011, 08:44 PM)
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I seem to have misread what you were trying to say then.
Being "open" as a requirement is very much a burdened concept.
Why would it be a requirement?
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It's not a requirement at all. It's a suggested stance or process. Think in terms of it being an outlook or perspective rather than a rule. As such, it's liberating. It basically says "I have nothing to be afraid of because, come what may, I know I can deal with it."
-40hz (February 14, 2011, 08:44 PM)
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Transparency is certainly a good thing. I just don't see a lot of authors (with good software even) coming out and spilling all their motivations. Most people don't care.
e.g.
http://www.7-zip.org/faq.html
There's not even the slightest attempt by the author to be open about anything, but I can't see that being a black mark against him. He's already done enough by giving his software out for free.
That's the kind of thing I mean.
Talking about the first there is simply futile, as bad people will be bad, and there's nothing to be done about it.
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Disagree.
There's actually quite a bit you can do about bad behavior. You can:
-40hz (February 14, 2011, 08:44 PM)
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I was trying to limit the scope there and not get into all that as it's an entirely HUGE can of worms. :)
cranioscopical:
you don't mind spending all your time answering inane requests to include irrelevant functionality
-Target (February 14, 2011, 08:18 PM)
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I asked you only for one little change :o
Target:
you don't mind spending all your time answering inane requests to include irrelevant functionality
-Target (February 14, 2011, 08:18 PM)
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I asked you only for one little change :o
-cranioscopical (February 14, 2011, 10:02 PM)
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those sorts of 'skinning' requests aren't generally appropriate for this forum :o
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