Just for Fun
Käännös: [ Google ]
Kategoriat: [ ATK ]
This is the follow-up to the previous episode.
Today's discussion with Ville was concluded more or less like that: he claimed that having access to the source code is of no use for him although he can code, because he has never been able to gather the necessary energy to start hacking an existing software. Well, that's his problem, isn't it? I devote some of my free time to hack software (in a very insignificant way, I'm sure) to adapt it to my needs, he devotes his to something else. And I enjoy my small software hacks. I'm proud of myself when I manage to understand MPlayer's subtitles code and add support for DVB subtitles, or when I add support for X11's screensaver protocol to perl's X11::Protocol module. And let's be honest: LATEX is ridiculously complicated, but I enjoy fighting the beast and bending it to my will.
I have loads of fun doing things myself. I make my own pizzas from scratch (dough and tomato sauce, altough I don't grow the tomatoes, olives and wheat, nor do I breed pigs or milk cows), I make my own ice-cream, my own Home Theater PC, my own blog engine, my own Carcassonne meeples. Buying something ready-made feels like a waste of money if I can do it myself for a reasonnable cost in time. I'm not going to devote large amounts of time on large projects such as writing my own operating sytem, word processor or image manipulation software, mainly because the time it would cost me compared to the benefit I would get out of it compared to using the existing tools is not worth it. Hacking oversized projects don't really interest me, even if they have bugs and I'd like to fix them. But I very much appreciate that small, one-person -sized softwares are free for me to hack when I set my mind to it.
The ones who consider the freedom given by free software to be useless are the ones who are too busy/lazy to take advantage of it and have more money at hand than time.
[ Postattu 22. lokakuuta 2008 klo 23.41 | 9 kommenttia | kestävä linkki ]
I didn't think that this discussion warrants more than the passing fun of having it, but since the post also seems to imply laziness on my part..
That was not my point. To re-iterate, my point remains that "There is a possibility that I could change this in some future" should not overtake "Does it work"-principle.
Example common to us both: the conference brochure that was done with proprietary software. The flaw in the brochure was, that it could have been done easily with latex. Well. No. I did not have time to invest there and no way it would have been a 1 day deal. It needed to be done then and there and an expert with a good tool did it. So how can it be inferior?
It is the same principle with the infamous data-persistence discussion, the food is going to kill you discussion and even the recumbent trike discussion. Practically everything we disagree happens because of the same reason: To me all these are things where securing the future completely costs much more than the potential failure. For me these things are tools with no intrinsic value.
.. There is relatively few things that have intrinsic value for me anyways. Perhaps none.