Re: The <whatever> developer syndrome

Jason Wood wrote:

> I always did wonder about when one stopped being "amateur" and became 
> "proffesional" instead - in the end I figured it was when you started earning 
> money at something :-)

In this context, I think that it would be better to refer to an armature 
attitude and a professional attitude since with OSS, you really can't make 
the distinction based on whether or not you are getting paid to do it.

> I'm not going to have a war of words here, pick a word or three which means 
> "something one does in their spare time for fun" and I will be happy :-) 

And the attitude is the difference here.  If you have a professional 
attitude, then the term "fun" would probably not apply.  And, I hope that 
contributors to the project are interested in more than having "fun".

> Whilst most open source developers have their own agendas as to why they are 
> developing the things that they are, I think the overwhelming majority would 
> not do it if it was not pleasurable.

Yes, I agree.  They wouldn't do it unless they enjoyed it.  But, this 
(enjoy) may mean very different things to different people
> 
>>as for people[1] who feel compelled to needlessly criticize others
>>regularly, openly and without providing constructive, realistic
>>solutions/thoughts, they are one of the sorts of people i prefer to simply
>>avoid in life: the sort who will tear down any structure no matter how
>>beautiful simply to satisfy their own insecurity.

To state the obvious: what this means is greatly dependent on his 
definition of 'needlessly' and 'criticize'.  People have a tendency to fail 
to understand the actual meaning of 'criticize'.

> To be fair, I think that there is a catergory of people who simply do not 
> quite understand what is and isn't accepted behaviour in open source 
> development, the usual breach of etiquette being to try and impose their own 
> personal view of the project on everyone else in the project. And when they 
> find that people do not take kindly to this, they vent their frustrations in 
> colorful ways.

I think that I understand you to understand that Aaron is doing the exact 
same thing that he accuses me of: "impose" his "personal view of the 
project on everyone else" -- the only difference being that his view of the 
project is different than mine.

I think that my professional attitude means that the enjoyment I get from 
programing is different -- it is certainly different from having "fun".  It 
is the self satisfaction obtained from doing the job well.

--
JRT


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