On Sat, 13 Oct 2007, david@lang.hm wrote:
quoted text
>
> I'll also point out that being a 'productive member of society' may have a
> wider definition then you may think initially.

I actually meant it in the absolutely most narrow possible meaning: you 
take the least productive person imaginable, who is certainly not going to 
do anything at all, and in the end, who cares? It's not like nonproductive 
people really hurt.

Some people in the open source / free software world get really upset 
about "freeloaders". I think that's silly. First off, I agree with you 
that a lot of people don't even end up being freeloaders - even if you 
never code a single line of code, there are ton of ways to be usefully 
involved (and some of them will be entirely invisible to any developer - 
helping random people outside the development lists, for example).

But more importantly, even somebody who really isn't productive at all 
generally can't be messing things up either - so it's a nonissue. Unless 
it results in tons of flaming ...

		Linus
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