Walter's annoying habits

[Bruno Medeiros]

Andrei Alexandrescu (See Website For Email) wrote:
> Manfred Nowak wrote:
>>> I intended this to be a serious, potentially constructive
>>> criticism of Walter's way of operating.
>>
>> It is a known phenomenon in organizations, especially charity
>> organizations, that all attributions to persons considered to be
>> leading characters of the organization will immediately bring up
>> all toadies of that organization against the attributor.
> 
> Ionno. I might have a wrong or simplistic image of the situation, but to 
> me things are simple: Walter is creating a product. He is motivated 
> mainly by community building and approval. The community uses his 
> product and provides useful feedback and suggestions for improvements. 
> In doing so, they invest time and talent in the product to various degrees.
> 
> The question is, how much improvement comes from a specific member of 
> the community, and what amount of entitlement should derive from that? I 
> don't know much about the historical contributions that people have made 
> to D, but my perception (and correct me if I'm wrong) is that Walter 
> holds an overwhelmingly high percent of the shares. In that case, it's 
> hard to make the case that a community member can behave as if Walter 
> owes him something.
> 
> 
> Andrei

I think it is important to clearly note the following:

One thing is to require, ask, or simply *want* for Walter (or in the 
general case, any person in power of any project) to do X.

Another thing is to claim that *it is best for D* (be it the language, 
community, or whatever) that X be done.

Usually both positions come together, but it must be noted that whereas 
for the first one, the contributions/money/favors/etc. of the proponent 
person do matter, for the second case, they do not matter at all. That 
is, one might have not contributed to D *anything*, not even the 
simplest contribution forms like commenting, testing, bug 
reporting,etc., but still one can make a valid claim of what he/she 
thinks would be better to be done or not.
Of course that claim could be wrong (or simply be subjective opinion), 
and then there is a valid line of discussion of whether the claim is 
wrong/not-wrong/subjective, but what is not a valid discussion or 
commenting is stuff like "Walter's work is free, so you don't have any 
right to say what should be done". That is something I've seen before on 
D, and also often on other open source projects, where it is a prevalent 
position. And it is a fallacy . Indeed I do not have the right to 
*demand* that something be done in project Foo for which I have 
contributed nothing, but I can still very well posit on what would be 
better to be done or not.

Bottom-line: Steward Gordon may not have formulated his opinion in an 
appropriate way, but it surely is not the "Walter's work is free, so you 
don't have any right to..." that renders Steward's opinion invalid.

-- 
Bruno Medeiros - MSc in CS/E student
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?BrunoMedeiros#D