Lost a new commercial user this week :(

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 29 December 2014 at 15:34:44 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
> On Monday, 29 December 2014 at 15:18:57 UTC, Gary Willoughby 
> wrote:
>> This is probably the most disgusting, selfish and deluded 
>> posts i've read on this entire newsgroup.
>
> I am pretty sure I have written worse.

Time out, everyone.  I really don't see any benefit to throwing 
around any more personalized criticism; it achieves nothing other 
than demotivation.

> This is widely advertised statement I can't agree with. For me 
> goal is having working language that works. Getting users is 
> indirect way to achieve that by attracting more contributions 
> but user just by itself has not value to _me_.

An indirect benefit is still a benefit -- as I said in my 
previous post, these things aren't a zero-sum game.  Among other 
things, more users means not only the likelihood of more 
contributions, but also more bugs and points of failure 
identified, more experienced people to use as a sounding board 
for ideas, more people to call on for help when you have a 
problem, and so on.

> And I really hate the culture of hiding own interests just to 
> look all nice.

It's fine to be self-interested, but it is important to know 
where your _real_ self-interest lies, and that usually involves 
looking out for the interests of others too. :-)

> How so? Walter and Andrei are not open-source contributors - D 
> is _their_ project.

I think the better line to draw here is between project 
leadership and community contributions -- after all, everyone is 
contributing open source code here.

> Do you disagree that this is the model of D developer 
> community? Or am I the ass because I write it down here instead 
> of acting all idealistic and inspirational?

I think there is a lot of misunderstanding arising here, because 
I think you are saying "I think this is how things actually work 
in practice" (arguable in the case of D, but probably true for 
many open source projects) and that's being mistaken for "I think 
this is how things ought to work."

I guess what I'd say is that, yes, I get how the idealistic and 
inspirational stuff can be irritating and feel like delusion, but 
it can be a pretty powerful tool to help facilitate the process 
of cooperation between different people who do indeed all have 
different itches to scratch.  Being "nice" isn't just a matter of 
being liked or not (not the most important thing in the world); 
it's a really handy means of minimizing the amount of unnecessary 
friction in a community.  It doesn't need to involve any 
rose-tinted spectacles or illusions about people's motivations, 
just a recognition of what is going to help promote positive or 
negative reactions from other people.