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Offset Bad Code, With Bad Code Offsets
An anonymous reader writes "Two weeks ago, The Daily WTF's Alex Papadimoulis announced Bad Code Offsets, a join venture between many big names in the software development community (including StackOverflow's Jeff Atwood and Jon Skeet and SourceGear's Eric Sink). The premise is that you can offset bad code by purchasing Bad Code Offsets (much in the same way a carbon-footprint is offset). The profits are donated to Free Software projects which work to eliminate bad code, such as the Apache Foundation and FreeBSD. The first cheques were sent out earlier today." Hopefully, they work better than carbon offsets, actually.
* (carbon, code, whatever) offsets are really the Papal indulgences of the 21st century.
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I think the intent is that you buy them as penance for bad code you've already written.
Which makes them pretty much unlike carbon offsets, but I guess someone thinks they're being amusing.
It's a clever fund-raising campaign for certain projects; I wouldn't read much more into it than that.
"Hopefully, they work better than carbon offsets, actually."
Way to ensure this whole thread goes off track, by trolling on an unrelated and politically charged topic. And with an example poorly chosen as proof of anything, at that.
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You're missing the point. The point is to poke fun at carbon schemes and raise money for free software. It's not to actually offset bad code, just to support good code writing organizations.
Why would someone feel guilty for developing closed source code?
The day Alex announced this was the day I finally stopped reading the DailyWTF. It's gotten worse and worse over the past few years, with stories that were so embellished that you stop caring. The fun part about the site was laughing at real IT blunders. But Alex and his creative writing team overdid the writing to the point where the stories were often incredibly far from the real fact (the original submitters would often explain the "real" story in the comments". This might be bearable if their writing wasn't so awful. But often they interchange important character names, have horribly confusing grammatical constructs, and generally just make a mess out of the stories.
Then to top it off, Alex shows up occasionally and comes up with nonsense like this instead of posting another story.
I'm done. Yes, it was amusing for awhile, but I'm moving on.
I think the intent is that you buy them as penance for bad code you've already written.
No way could I come up with that kind of coin.
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Why would someone feel guilty for that? It's not like the buyer has no choice.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Assuming that the guy I'm selling it to has a real choice whether to buy the car, understands that the hood is welded shut before buying, and I don't try to use legal means to keep him from unwelding the hood or getting to the engine, why should I feel bad about selling it to him?
In what way? Closed source says nothing about whether you actually use some of the very-bad laws on the books to prevent people from inspecting the workings of your program. Its perfectly possibly for me to write a closed-source program and not drag people to court for reverse engineering, and even write a license to that effect.
If I do not explicitly permit someone to distribute modifications of my software, that *would* fall under copyright law, but that's not covered by the analogy. In fact, its pretty difficult to come up with a car analogy that actually makes sense. Whether you view copyright as moral or not falls to your personal belief. My belief is that, despite Stallman's protestations, it is possible to distribute software under copyright morally, even though a lot of proprietary software vendors do not do so.
I don't think it's that clever. People who frequent WTF think it's the other guy who writes bad code.