(that kind of comment saved HN bandwidth several dozen KB, I wager. But, have it your way.)
Your argument about scarcity is akin to saying "Never mind that we have trees that drop fruit on the ground for everyone into perpetuity--when you consider that we collect some fruit, cart it off to town, polish it, and cart it back, and sell it, of course fruit is a scarce resource!"
If the time/effort would've been expended anyways, yeah, it's effectively free. If the time/effort would've been better spent elsewhere, it shold've been.
> (that kind of comment saved HN bandwidth several dozen KB, I wager. But, have it your way.)
Come on now, you've been here long enough to know that's not how HN works. It's about basic respect towards others--not just to the poster, but to all of us here on HN. As a developer (and someone who runs a development shop?) you know that developer time is important. A comment is 10 seconds to write but will be broadcast on a site like HN to be read by many over many cumulative hours. Say those things which are worth saying to 100k hackers, not those things which are not worth saying to one.
You run a C-based dev shop out of Houston. I run a C-based dev shop out of Austin. The probability of us doing business together IRL is unusually high. Now when we meet, I'm always going to be thinking of you as that guy who gets into flamewars and insults others, instead of the guy who writes beautifully-commented crypto POSIX code.
You know, you raise a pretty good point. I screwed up in the heat of the moment.
I can go to great lengths to explain that the copyright/IP battle is uphill, and that every talking point parroted blindly and every baseless assertion made without logic is just more deadweight we have to work against, and that the (relative few) people trying to work for a better future can't afford to treat unsubstantiated remarks with anything less than full-on ridicule and insult. That's all well and good.
But, really, this is about respect, and regardless of how I feel on the topic, I crossed a line in what is otherwise a place of civil discourse (and the occasional lighthearted troll).
Your argument about scarcity is akin to saying "Never mind that we have trees that drop fruit on the ground for everyone into perpetuity--when you consider that we collect some fruit, cart it off to town, polish it, and cart it back, and sell it, of course fruit is a scarce resource!"
If the time/effort would've been expended anyways, yeah, it's effectively free. If the time/effort would've been better spent elsewhere, it shold've been.