Richmond, rudeness and commercial enterprise

Mathewson richmond at mail.maclaunch.com
Mon Aug 18 10:56:00 EDT 2003


Yes, Alex Rice, you are quite right: my message is
extremely rude!  I did not enjoy writing it....however
there are one or 2 points......

1.  If RR is a commercial enterprise then it might like to
consider rewarding developer contribs: the idea of FREE or
not FREE can work in both directions.

There has certainly been the impression of a 'community' -
now one of the shortcomings of RR is the lack of an
adequate manual that will serve the needs of new
programmers - the use-lists, to a certain extent, serve
that purpose.  However
if users are writing the manual (so to speak) should they
not have some benefit from it?

The concept of a community where people give freely of
their time and effort to contribute to building something
(in this case a knowledge base) seems directly the opposite
of a
commercial enterprise.  I understood that the Runtime
Revolution team were doing something admirable; an attempt
to combine both concepts in what we might like to term "a
third way" or "enlightened commercialism".

However, the removal of the 'free' version of RR does away
with this image and leave us with raw commercialism.  So
henceforward words like "RR developer community" will sound
a bit hollow.

I have been repeatedly encouraged in my comments to the
use-list and contributions both to the developer contribs
page and on my own small website by both RR staff members
and by other use-list members; and that made me feel part
of a 'community' in which at least some of my stuff was
valued.

I have always made it explicit that I could not afford a
license (I do not develop software for anybody at the
moment) this did not stop anybody encouraging me.

The reason why I feel f***ed off is because I will no
longer be able to contribute very successfully to the
use-list or the developer contribs page being unable to
have proper access to future RR builds.

2.  Rudeness.......I remember hearing about some aid
workers in Ethiopia who gave out free orange juice to
children: the parents would come and help the aid workers
in a variety of ways.  Suddenly the aid workers started
demanding money for the juice - one of them was killed by a
prent of one of the children who had previously recieved
juice.

All very sad, Richmond Mathewson

__________________________________________________
See Mathewson's software at:

http://members.maclaunch.com/richmond/default.html    and
http://www.runrev.com/Revolution1/developercentral/usercontributions.html
__________________________________________________
---------------------------------------------------------------
Great Macintosh Products 
 The MacLaunch Store! http://www.maclaunch.com/cgi-launch/store/agora.cgi
---------------------------------------------------------------



More information about the use-livecode mailing list