Re: Future of Dolphin Survey

On 9/6/07, Mark Haniford <[email protected]> wrote:

> The Dolphin guys spent a
> good chunk of their lives invested in building Dolphin and have every
> right to be compensated.

Capitalism doesn't, as it happens, work that way.  Nobody has a
"right" to be compensated for working, even really hard for a long time,
unless someone actually wants the product of their work enough
to pay for it.  Since this product is being abandoned, it's probably
no longer paying the developers enough to justify further
investment.

The decade they have put into it is no longer an investment, therefore;
it's a sunk cost, and it's irrational to make decisions based on how
much you have sunk into something now worthless.  (You shouldn't
go to a play you don't want to see just because you paid $$$$ for a
ticket back when you did want to.  That money is gone, and you
should decide what to do based on how much fun it will be and
what it will cost you *now*.)

So indeed they can sit on it until it rots, or they can try to extract
one final payment for it.  If people decide they need this particular
Smalltalk for their own purposes, I don't discourage them from
paying for it -- for them it is not a sunk cost but an asset worth
liberating.  But before I pay, I'd like to know the specific
advantages, that's all.

Sorry to make a fuss about this, but there's a general point here
that needed addressing.

-- 
GMail doesn't have rotating .sigs, but you can see mine at
http://www.ccil.org/~cowan/signatures

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