You are describing the difference between a geek and a professional. Most technical professionals have an inner geek the same way adults have an inner child; 90% of the time, it's hidden away because its responses to situations are wholly inappropriate. The other ten percent of the time is when we do things like gather around a PC in the lab playing "Truck Dismount" as a noncompetitive team sport.
Finding Nemo is still Finding Nemo. Nobody is creating content that couldn't be shown on analog and showing it on digital. They're just taking what they've already got and pumping it out the door with a bigger pump. Even when everybody goes to digital signal, the content really isn't going to change that much... until the broadcaster can make more money from it.
> The difference is that Analog NTSC broadcasts > degrade the source more than the digital broadcast does
That's what I said. Both broadcasts are from the same source. Whether the source is digital or analog doesn't matter, it's the same content. You may get a sharper and clearer view of Will and Grace on a digital feed, but it's still Will and Grace - and if the original recording was analog, digital transmission can't improve it. You're limited by the quality of the original. The value in a digital signal is a lack of degradation, but if you can't save it and store it, that's hardly worth anything at all.
> they will have the ONLY legally-protected (because of DMCA) > platform for delivering protected content
Whose fault is that?
Seriously, I keep hearing people say "Microsoft is going to be the only company with technology X and everyone else will go out of business!", and yet we have this massive open source community that is more than capable of developing technology X faster, better, and cheaper.
So why don't they? I mean, face it, if it's so awful that Microsoft will be the only company that has it... shouldn't we not let that happen? Why can't we mobilise our army of programmers to stop it?
Sooner or later you start to figure out that the only thing all your failures have in common is you.
That's a weird crowd, though. They're complaining about Sony, but they're still buying Sony's products.
And I do think this conclusion's a product of straight up anti-Microsoft bias. I don't think any rational human being can predict a third-place run for the 360 this early in the game for the other two players. There's simply no evidence to support it.
You're missing the point. The broadcast does not and indeed cannot arrive at your receiver in any better condition than it was in as it left the broadcaster. The broadcaster is not increasing the quality of the content, only the quality of the broadcast. The content itself is the same.
Yes, but it's a useful and convenient fiction, so I use it. Feel free to use whatever tortured linguistic construct you like to represent corporate rights as opposed to individual rights, I'll just pretend that a corporation has the same rights as an individual.
Oh, wait, that's the legal reality. Hmm.
WRT the point that they all take your freedoms away, this is only true as long as it isn't more profitable to give you those freedoms. Corporations don't have ideals and dreams. They have revenue, period. (Which is where the legal reality is not EMPIRICAL reality. Human beings have a moral compass and the ability to feel guilt. Corporations don't.) So as long as it doesn't cost the corporation money to abuse you with DRM bullshit, they will do it.
So essentially you have to pirate. Boycotts don't do it; if you don't buy the movie at all from anyone, nobody knows you want it. You have to demonstrate that you represent a demand that they could not supply. I don't like piracy, and I don't want to encourage it, but unfortunately it is the only thing that communicates the problem accurately: we want the product, just not from you.
> I agree that DRM sucks. But so does rampant piracy.
That's an important point. However, I think piracy is an important part of a free market: clearly there is a demand for the product, you're just not providing the supply at an optimal price point. I think a small amount of piracy is inevitable, but rampant piracy is a big flashing neon sign that says "your market strategy is broken". Rampant piracy means it is so much easier to steal your product than it is to buy it, nobody is willing to do anything else. If that destroys your business, it's not the piracy that did it, but your own failure to manage effectively.
You're still right. Piracy sucks. Large-scale piracy sucks on a large scale. But DRM doesn't fix it; instead, it just makes things worse.
> The higher resolution, while nice, is not worth the restrictions.
BINGO.
Yeah, I can tell the difference between an HD-DVD and a regular DVD. I just don't really care. It's only useful on the rare occasions I want to crop a frame down to an interesting detail and post it somewhere, which is exactly the sort of thing DRM wants to prevent. If I have to take on a whole new layer of pain-in-the-ass, what do I get for it? Five or six captures a year? Screw that.
A DVD doesn't go all to shit if you pack it next to a speaker.
VHS degrades. That's why piracy was never a big deal: you copy a tape, the copy is a little worse than the original. Digital data isn't. It's identical.
That doesn't change the fact that the content providers will seize as much power as they can under the spectre of piracy, then use it to try and extort more money out of you. You have a solid point there. But when it becomes obvious to everyone involved that the piracy isn't stopped and the providers are just being money-grubbing assholes, people will vote with their feet. If the providers want to continue providing, they will have to drop the DRM bullshit, or the business will all go to the pirates.
I would disagree, but I would not find the idea to be divorced from reality. The Wii is a powerful contender. I believe it may surpass the PS3, IF the developers step up with a vengeance. I believe this is unlikely, because I think the only truly revolutionary use of the Wii technology will be in first-party games. Third-party developers will generally either copy Nintendo badly, or do something new and ill-advised.
> Somebody has to sell fewer consoles than the others
I don't think the Wii AND the PS3 can BOTH surpass the 360. I think this race is either 360-PS3-Wii, PS3-360-Wii, or 360-Wii-PS3. In that order. I do not believe the Wii can be number one, and I do not believe the 360 can be number three.
Yes, I read the article. It blandly asserts that as soon as you try to watch anything with DRM, everything gets automatically degraded and there's nothing you can do about it. And then HAX0RZ HAV STOLUN YUOR MEGAHURTZ! Oh Golly! YOU ARE TRAPPED and here is my butt.
Simply put, I don't believe that when I watch a DRM-protected movie, my system will be forever degraded by the act. I believe I'll have some degradation while I'm watching it. I believe I may see some corollary degradation in other content I watch at the same time. But when I take that DRM-protected disc out of my drive and replace it with an unprotected disc, I don't believe I will continue to experience that degradation. I believe I will be able to say "DRM-protected content looks like crap" and decide not to buy it. Which is precisely what ought to happen.
There are two freedoms at issue here: yours and the content provider's. He wants to take your freedom away, so you want to take his away. I say both of you should keep your freedom, so he can take your freedom away and watch you go to someone who doesn't. Then he'll stop doing it.
> Without the religious angle, there isn't much to free will.
It's interesting to note that while free will is an illusion, this is one of those amazing contradictions in human nature where even though something is false, it is more productive to pretend it is true.
Take, for example, the question of whether a given person will attack you. The reality of this is that the person will act according to a complex chemical process which is inevitable. Whatever happens, its probability is 100%. But you don't know the process. So you evaluate the evidence in front of you to determine the probability that the chemical process leads to an attack. Judging from the localised processes you see occurring and the long-term processes whose results are evident, you may conclude that there is an 80% chance that the chemical process will lead 100% to him attacking you.
This does not in any way differ from a free will decision that has an 80% chance of being "attack".
It's all semantic. The difference is that the objectively true description is much longer and more complicated. It would take longer to evaluate. By handwaving the objective reality and pretending it's a free will decision, we can make a faster determination. That has real objective value, and when we work from the objective reality, we lose that.
The digital broadcasts currently being made are just a duplication of the analog broadcasts. The difference between the two is zero. No additional content is provided.
Every time I see an analysis of what DRM means to the consumer, I see all this crap about how it's going to make things more expensive and lower quality. And that's true - SOME things will be more expensive and lower quality.
But these analyses never stop to consider HOW MUCH will be more expensive and lower quality, or exactly what changes we're discussing. What will be lower quality and more expensive is the DRM-protected content. And DRM sucks. People will complain. Vendors will eventually listen.
At the moment, we have a lot of content providers who refuse to provide any content without DRM because they can't imagine making a profit otherwise. DRM gets them to provide something instead of nothing. Historically, unprotected content outperforms protected content; because you spend nothing trying to stop people from stealing it, you recover more revenue than you were losing to theft anyway. If we just let providers choose, they will eventually make the right choice. We can't force them to make the right choice NOW, because they won't make it. They'll provide zero content.
That's the false dilemma. Everyone seems to think the choice is protected content or unprotected content, but it's not - it's protected content or NO content. Fighting the protected content is not going to get you what you want. You have to let the providers make their stupid DRM plans and try them, so they'll see for themselves that it's stupid.
> most uber-geeks hate non-geeks trying to be geeks...
The primary benefit of open source software is that you can be a geek with it. When it doesn't work, you open up the source and muck around. Geeks love that.
Non-geeks hate it. But since their geek friends tell them how great this is, they try to do it anyway, and they fuck everything up. Then they go to their geek friends, who now hate them because they're non-geeks trying to be geeks.
But this was YOUR IDEA! Honestly, WTF is your problem?!
> I gave you plenty of facts, you just ignored > them and threw rude comments back at me.
Your facts were irrelevant. That's not a rude comment, it's a fact. Go back over the thread.
> I'm sorry they kicked you out.
Yeah, it's just *terrible* when your project ships. What a massive failure I must be.
And that's three rude comments in a row about my job. I might make rude comments about your stupid arguments and ignorant assertions, but I certainly don't suggest anything ridiculous like "you must not know what you're talking about because you're Dutch and everyone in the Netherlands smokes marijuana". That's not a fact at all. It's not even remotely close to being a fact.
So I don't try to use it as part of my argument, because it doesn't belong there.
Yeah, since I don't agree with you, I must not know what I'm talking about. It's a complete fluke that I knew EXACTLY how the community would react to the suggestion that open source is a fantastically ineffective process: denial. Yet most of the top theorists in open source thoroughly admit that the process shouldn't work. They point to the underlying systems and say "this should not produce anything of value at all". Then they pull out stuff like the Linux kernel and say "wow, we were wrong". The hundreds of broken and inadequate projects surrounding it, they ignore. The process shouldn't work, and it doesn't. Denial doesn't change that.
And FUD? How dare you. When the success rate of open source projects is questioned, you're right there to insist that the problem isn't an overwhelmingly ineffective process, but that we are using the wrong definition of "project" and the wrong definition of "failure" and the wrong definition of "success". That's just marketing bullshit, and you know it.
You do not have one single fact to support your position, because you are wrong. The evidence for open source is exclusively anecdotal. The evidence against it is overwhelmingly obvious. Don't take my word for it; after all, I've worked for Microsoft. I must be biased. Gather your own statistics. The open source community has a problem, and refuses to fix it. That's stupid.
Or you could just shut your eyes and stick your fingers in your ears and say "na na na na na" really loud until I go away.
> You (singular) dragged MS into this discussion without reason
You (singular) keep talking about how popular a project is as though that matters.
When people say that Microsoft must create quality software because so many people use it, you (plural, i.e. the open source community) immediately perceive and loudly repeat that popularity is not the same thing as quality.
You cannot have this both ways. If popularity is not quality, and it's not, then you can't use the popularity of a product as evidence of its quality.
And that's my reason.
> Calling me names and throwing around insults about > it doesn't make you (singular) look any better.
What names and what insults?
> I was not comparing just to FOSS projects, I was > comparing to closed source software as well.
It doesn't matter. If your one project is a phenomenal success, it is still only one project. It does not change the percentage of projects that fail, and it doesn't have much impact on the average length of successful projects.
> I distinctly remember you calling my community a > bunch of monkeys
No, I called the *flaw* in the community the "infinite monkeys fallacy". Joel Spolsky explained it a little differently:
"The real trouble with using a lot of mediocre programmers instead of a couple of good ones is that no matter how long they work, they never produce something as good as what the great programmers can produce. Five Antonio Salieris won't produce Mozart's Requiem. Ever. Not if they work for 100 years."
You can read that whole article at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.h tml if you're interested. It's not about open source; it's about building high-quality software. And in my experience, the open source community would do well to occasionally shut up about open source and spend some time learning about high-quality software. You know, maybe 20% of the time, or something like that.
I call this problem - recruiting a lot of mediocre programmers instead of a few good ones - the "infinite monkeys fallacy", because it's the same stupid idea that leads people to say "if an infinite number of monkeys typed on an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite amount of time, they would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare".
In other words, IT'S A FUCKING METAPHOR. Nobody called you a monkey. Grow up.
> So why not help out these "failed" projects with your > obviously valuable feedback, instead of spending all > your time complaining about it on Slashdot?
I'm a professional software project manager. Any open source project that wants my services is more than welcome to pay for them just like everyone else, and I'll put every bit as much time and effort into it as I would for a commercial client.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yeah: or post on Slashdot!
Just out of curiosity, precisely how often DO people advise you to "get a life"?
I mean, I don't run into specimens of your kind in the wild all that often. Not even on Slashdot.
You are describing the difference between a geek and a professional. Most technical professionals have an inner geek the same way adults have an inner child; 90% of the time, it's hidden away because its responses to situations are wholly inappropriate. The other ten percent of the time is when we do things like gather around a PC in the lab playing "Truck Dismount" as a noncompetitive team sport.
> It's not the same.
Finding Nemo is still Finding Nemo. Nobody is creating content that couldn't be shown on analog and showing it on digital. They're just taking what they've already got and pumping it out the door with a bigger pump. Even when everybody goes to digital signal, the content really isn't going to change that much... until the broadcaster can make more money from it.
> The difference is that Analog NTSC broadcasts
> degrade the source more than the digital broadcast does
That's what I said. Both broadcasts are from the same source. Whether the source is digital or analog doesn't matter, it's the same content. You may get a sharper and clearer view of Will and Grace on a digital feed, but it's still Will and Grace - and if the original recording was analog, digital transmission can't improve it. You're limited by the quality of the original. The value in a digital signal is a lack of degradation, but if you can't save it and store it, that's hardly worth anything at all.
> they will have the ONLY legally-protected (because of DMCA)
> platform for delivering protected content
Whose fault is that?
Seriously, I keep hearing people say "Microsoft is going to be the only company with technology X and everyone else will go out of business!", and yet we have this massive open source community that is more than capable of developing technology X faster, better, and cheaper.
So why don't they? I mean, face it, if it's so awful that Microsoft will be the only company that has it... shouldn't we not let that happen? Why can't we mobilise our army of programmers to stop it?
Sooner or later you start to figure out that the only thing all your failures have in common is you.
> considering the strong anti-Sony bias
That's a weird crowd, though. They're complaining about Sony, but they're still buying Sony's products.
And I do think this conclusion's a product of straight up anti-Microsoft bias. I don't think any rational human being can predict a third-place run for the 360 this early in the game for the other two players. There's simply no evidence to support it.
You're missing the point. The broadcast does not and indeed cannot arrive at your receiver in any better condition than it was in as it left the broadcaster. The broadcaster is not increasing the quality of the content, only the quality of the broadcast. The content itself is the same.
And therefore, fighting the protected content is not going to get you what you want. What's the problem?
Yes, but it's a useful and convenient fiction, so I use it. Feel free to use whatever tortured linguistic construct you like to represent corporate rights as opposed to individual rights, I'll just pretend that a corporation has the same rights as an individual.
Oh, wait, that's the legal reality. Hmm.
WRT the point that they all take your freedoms away, this is only true as long as it isn't more profitable to give you those freedoms. Corporations don't have ideals and dreams. They have revenue, period. (Which is where the legal reality is not EMPIRICAL reality. Human beings have a moral compass and the ability to feel guilt. Corporations don't.) So as long as it doesn't cost the corporation money to abuse you with DRM bullshit, they will do it.
So essentially you have to pirate. Boycotts don't do it; if you don't buy the movie at all from anyone, nobody knows you want it. You have to demonstrate that you represent a demand that they could not supply. I don't like piracy, and I don't want to encourage it, but unfortunately it is the only thing that communicates the problem accurately: we want the product, just not from you.
> I agree that DRM sucks. But so does rampant piracy.
That's an important point. However, I think piracy is an important part of a free market: clearly there is a demand for the product, you're just not providing the supply at an optimal price point. I think a small amount of piracy is inevitable, but rampant piracy is a big flashing neon sign that says "your market strategy is broken". Rampant piracy means it is so much easier to steal your product than it is to buy it, nobody is willing to do anything else. If that destroys your business, it's not the piracy that did it, but your own failure to manage effectively.
You're still right. Piracy sucks. Large-scale piracy sucks on a large scale. But DRM doesn't fix it; instead, it just makes things worse.
> The higher resolution, while nice, is not worth the restrictions.
BINGO.
Yeah, I can tell the difference between an HD-DVD and a regular DVD. I just don't really care. It's only useful on the rare occasions I want to crop a frame down to an interesting detail and post it somewhere, which is exactly the sort of thing DRM wants to prevent. If I have to take on a whole new layer of pain-in-the-ass, what do I get for it? Five or six captures a year? Screw that.
A DVD doesn't go all to shit if you pack it next to a speaker.
VHS degrades. That's why piracy was never a big deal: you copy a tape, the copy is a little worse than the original. Digital data isn't. It's identical.
That doesn't change the fact that the content providers will seize as much power as they can under the spectre of piracy, then use it to try and extort more money out of you. You have a solid point there. But when it becomes obvious to everyone involved that the piracy isn't stopped and the providers are just being money-grubbing assholes, people will vote with their feet. If the providers want to continue providing, they will have to drop the DRM bullshit, or the business will all go to the pirates.
> had this guy said the PS3 was going to lose
I would disagree, but I would not find the idea to be divorced from reality. The Wii is a powerful contender. I believe it may surpass the PS3, IF the developers step up with a vengeance. I believe this is unlikely, because I think the only truly revolutionary use of the Wii technology will be in first-party games. Third-party developers will generally either copy Nintendo badly, or do something new and ill-advised.
> Somebody has to sell fewer consoles than the others
I don't think the Wii AND the PS3 can BOTH surpass the 360. I think this race is either 360-PS3-Wii, PS3-360-Wii, or 360-Wii-PS3. In that order. I do not believe the Wii can be number one, and I do not believe the 360 can be number three.
Yes, I read the article. It blandly asserts that as soon as you try to watch anything with DRM, everything gets automatically degraded and there's nothing you can do about it. And then HAX0RZ HAV STOLUN YUOR MEGAHURTZ! Oh Golly! YOU ARE TRAPPED and here is my butt.
Simply put, I don't believe that when I watch a DRM-protected movie, my system will be forever degraded by the act. I believe I'll have some degradation while I'm watching it. I believe I may see some corollary degradation in other content I watch at the same time. But when I take that DRM-protected disc out of my drive and replace it with an unprotected disc, I don't believe I will continue to experience that degradation. I believe I will be able to say "DRM-protected content looks like crap" and decide not to buy it. Which is precisely what ought to happen.
There are two freedoms at issue here: yours and the content provider's. He wants to take your freedom away, so you want to take his away. I say both of you should keep your freedom, so he can take your freedom away and watch you go to someone who doesn't. Then he'll stop doing it.
You mean... a Slashdot contributor is predicting that the Microsoft product will be the biggest failure?
Man, I didn't see THAT coming.
> Without the religious angle, there isn't much to free will.
It's interesting to note that while free will is an illusion, this is one of those amazing contradictions in human nature where even though something is false, it is more productive to pretend it is true.
Take, for example, the question of whether a given person will attack you. The reality of this is that the person will act according to a complex chemical process which is inevitable. Whatever happens, its probability is 100%. But you don't know the process. So you evaluate the evidence in front of you to determine the probability that the chemical process leads to an attack. Judging from the localised processes you see occurring and the long-term processes whose results are evident, you may conclude that there is an 80% chance that the chemical process will lead 100% to him attacking you.
This does not in any way differ from a free will decision that has an 80% chance of being "attack".
It's all semantic. The difference is that the objectively true description is much longer and more complicated. It would take longer to evaluate. By handwaving the objective reality and pretending it's a free will decision, we can make a faster determination. That has real objective value, and when we work from the objective reality, we lose that.
The digital broadcasts currently being made are just a duplication of the analog broadcasts. The difference between the two is zero. No additional content is provided.
Every time I see an analysis of what DRM means to the consumer, I see all this crap about how it's going to make things more expensive and lower quality. And that's true - SOME things will be more expensive and lower quality.
But these analyses never stop to consider HOW MUCH will be more expensive and lower quality, or exactly what changes we're discussing. What will be lower quality and more expensive is the DRM-protected content. And DRM sucks. People will complain. Vendors will eventually listen.
At the moment, we have a lot of content providers who refuse to provide any content without DRM because they can't imagine making a profit otherwise. DRM gets them to provide something instead of nothing. Historically, unprotected content outperforms protected content; because you spend nothing trying to stop people from stealing it, you recover more revenue than you were losing to theft anyway. If we just let providers choose, they will eventually make the right choice. We can't force them to make the right choice NOW, because they won't make it. They'll provide zero content.
That's the false dilemma. Everyone seems to think the choice is protected content or unprotected content, but it's not - it's protected content or NO content. Fighting the protected content is not going to get you what you want. You have to let the providers make their stupid DRM plans and try them, so they'll see for themselves that it's stupid.
> most uber-geeks hate non-geeks trying to be geeks...
The primary benefit of open source software is that you can be a geek with it. When it doesn't work, you open up the source and muck around. Geeks love that.
Non-geeks hate it. But since their geek friends tell them how great this is, they try to do it anyway, and they fuck everything up. Then they go to their geek friends, who now hate them because they're non-geeks trying to be geeks.
But this was YOUR IDEA! Honestly, WTF is your problem?!
> I gave you plenty of facts, you just ignored
> them and threw rude comments back at me.
Your facts were irrelevant. That's not a rude comment, it's a fact. Go back over the thread.
> I'm sorry they kicked you out.
Yeah, it's just *terrible* when your project ships. What a massive failure I must be.
And that's three rude comments in a row about my job. I might make rude comments about your stupid arguments and ignorant assertions, but I certainly don't suggest anything ridiculous like "you must not know what you're talking about because you're Dutch and everyone in the Netherlands smokes marijuana". That's not a fact at all. It's not even remotely close to being a fact.
So I don't try to use it as part of my argument, because it doesn't belong there.
Think about that for a while.
Yeah, since I don't agree with you, I must not know what I'm talking about. It's a complete fluke that I knew EXACTLY how the community would react to the suggestion that open source is a fantastically ineffective process: denial. Yet most of the top theorists in open source thoroughly admit that the process shouldn't work. They point to the underlying systems and say "this should not produce anything of value at all". Then they pull out stuff like the Linux kernel and say "wow, we were wrong". The hundreds of broken and inadequate projects surrounding it, they ignore. The process shouldn't work, and it doesn't. Denial doesn't change that.
And FUD? How dare you. When the success rate of open source projects is questioned, you're right there to insist that the problem isn't an overwhelmingly ineffective process, but that we are using the wrong definition of "project" and the wrong definition of "failure" and the wrong definition of "success". That's just marketing bullshit, and you know it.
You do not have one single fact to support your position, because you are wrong. The evidence for open source is exclusively anecdotal. The evidence against it is overwhelmingly obvious. Don't take my word for it; after all, I've worked for Microsoft. I must be biased. Gather your own statistics. The open source community has a problem, and refuses to fix it. That's stupid.
Or you could just shut your eyes and stick your fingers in your ears and say "na na na na na" really loud until I go away.
Yeah, because it's got that scary "manager" word in it, which means I must be just like that pointy-haired guy in Dilbert! Oh nos! That is teh suck!
Fear of management is common to the incompetent.
> You (singular) dragged MS into this discussion without reason
h tml if you're interested. It's not about open source; it's about building high-quality software. And in my experience, the open source community would do well to occasionally shut up about open source and spend some time learning about high-quality software. You know, maybe 20% of the time, or something like that.
You (singular) keep talking about how popular a project is as though that matters.
When people say that Microsoft must create quality software because so many people use it, you (plural, i.e. the open source community) immediately perceive and loudly repeat that popularity is not the same thing as quality.
You cannot have this both ways. If popularity is not quality, and it's not, then you can't use the popularity of a product as evidence of its quality.
And that's my reason.
> Calling me names and throwing around insults about
> it doesn't make you (singular) look any better.
What names and what insults?
> I was not comparing just to FOSS projects, I was
> comparing to closed source software as well.
It doesn't matter. If your one project is a phenomenal success, it is still only one project. It does not change the percentage of projects that fail, and it doesn't have much impact on the average length of successful projects.
> I distinctly remember you calling my community a
> bunch of monkeys
No, I called the *flaw* in the community the "infinite monkeys fallacy". Joel Spolsky explained it a little differently:
"The real trouble with using a lot of mediocre programmers instead of a couple of good ones is that no matter how long they work, they never produce something as good as what the great programmers can produce. Five Antonio Salieris won't produce Mozart's Requiem. Ever. Not if they work for 100 years."
You can read that whole article at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.
I call this problem - recruiting a lot of mediocre programmers instead of a few good ones - the "infinite monkeys fallacy", because it's the same stupid idea that leads people to say "if an infinite number of monkeys typed on an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite amount of time, they would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare".
In other words, IT'S A FUCKING METAPHOR. Nobody called you a monkey. Grow up.
> So why not help out these "failed" projects with your
> obviously valuable feedback, instead of spending all
> your time complaining about it on Slashdot?
I'm a professional software project manager. Any open source project that wants my services is more than welcome to pay for them just like everyone else, and I'll put every bit as much time and effort into it as I would for a commercial client.
> But I am worthy of your ridicule.
No, the *community* is worthy of knowing that I find you ridiculous.
If I just ignore you, nobody really knows why. You might not deserve my time and effort, but the community does.
Sounds a lot like the open source philosophy. How ironic.