Hacker News Reader

Comment by bcrescimanno | Hacker News Reader

Not to digress too much from your original comment (which I completely agree with) but I think there's a certain "smugness" that I see associated with people who release anything as free--as if somehow the act of benevolence has put them on a plane above those who choose not to. I think that's unfortunate for multiple reasons; not the least of which is that people should be commended for sharing things under free / open licenses and I'm far less inclined to do so if they get all smug about it (this applies whether the "things" in question are software, photographs, writings, music, film, etc).

I agree with both authors; but I find this particular article far more obnoxious than the one to which its responding--again, because it comes across quite smug.

View on HN

I feel that any sense of smugness in this article is more than outshone by the sense of entitlement in the original. The second post acknowledges reality (that many good quality photos are available for free) while the first post seems to whine about the consequences of that reality (when free photos are so widely available, why should you be surprised/angry when someone asks you for your photos for free?)

Why shouldn’t the first photographer have a “sense of entitlement”? He’s entitled! He has the right to set prices for his work, and the rest of us have the right to pay, negotiate a better price, or walk away from the deal.

But going up to someone and saying “you should give this away” is not negotiating for a better price; it’s practically an insult. It’s like walking into a car dealership, seeing that the sticker price is $10,000, and telling the salespeople that they really should let it go for $3,000.

Also note the difference between “I want to give my work away” and “you ought to give your work away”.

It largely depends on the context the "you should give this away" is said in.

If say a well known media organization says, "You should let me use this photo for free, because I will give you credit and that might help you get business later" that is negotiating. The creator of the photo may or may not like the terms, but it is an offer of something of value for something of value. At worst, if the photographer is already well known, it is a bad offer that is wasting his time, but it is never insulting.

If someone who studies economics says to a new photographer, "You should stop selling photos and sell the service of creating new photos on order due to the marginal prices involved and current market situation. Give your old ones away to build up reputation." This is not an insult, but advice (whether or not it is good advice is a different question).

He is entitled to set the asking price for his work, but that is all.

If say a well known media organization says, "You should let me use this photo for free, because I will give you credit and that might help you get business later"

Why won't the "well-known media organization" pay what the photo is worth? Almost by definition they can afford to. If they still negotiate in this manner, that is an insult. No?

No. The whole point here is that the worth of the photo is not determined by the photographer - it is determined by the market. If an alternative photo exists for free, as is often the case, then the well known media organization is not being insulting when it offers the going rate, even if the going rate is "free".

I would find having my time wasted pretty insulting.

Contrary to your claim, lowball bids are often considered insulting.

Smart negotiators don't use them unless they're willing to accept the fallout that results from this; such as hurt feelings, and the potential loss of all negotiation power because the other individual was insulted by what they felt was bad-faith negotiation.

It's a great strategy if you don't care about relationships and if you don't care about your reputation. It's a terrible strategy in the real world.

I think the crux of this whole issue is whether or not "free for credit" is really a lowball bid. Let's say I've narrowed my search for sunset pictures down to 3 choices. One is CC licensed. One is public domain. One is priced at $6,000. When 2 out of my 3 options cost $0, then $0 should not be considered a lowball bid. It is a realistic bid based on market conditions.

If dealerships up and down the street are all selling cars for $3,000 then the guys who are trying to get the $10000 sticker price should not be too insulted or even surprised when someone offers them $3,000.

Please don't make car analogies when speaking about copyright. Copyright and selling cars are unrelated concepts, and this analogy has been beaten to death.

I feel the same as you. Giving (music, money, software), is extremely personal, and one that shouldn't be done lightly, or out of pressure from others.

Personally, I'd love to be able to release a beneficial OSS software tool or commit a valuable patch to a project, but I'm not a good enough developer. Yet, I feel like a second class citizen in the development community because I haven't

It is your own feeling of inadequacy that prevents you from contributing. That's also likely a major contributing factor to why you feel the author is being smug.

The only thing preventing you from excellence is your fear. You don't have to be "worthy" to make something good; you just need the ambition to set high goals, the drive and tenacity to meet those goals, and the thick skin to shrug off the inevitable judgments of others. All great men are called crazy at one point or another, and all great men have doubted themselves. Why should you be any different?

Contribute documentation or bug reports. These are as valuable as code.

Or contribute how it is hard to contribute. If contributing to OSS is hard, then OSS communities may be able to make it easier.

For instance, I'm involved in Wikipedia heavily and have always thought that it would be worth contributing to MediaWiki: at the very least being willing to beta test new stuff and write tests and so on. It's a big legacy hairball type project, but the community have made it easier to contribute by documenting the process of getting a working environment setup, by better documenting the process of submitting bugs and patches to bugzilla, by marking a bunch of bugs as suitable for newbies, by the new maintenance/dev scripts and by having a newbie developers liaison person.

If you want to get involved in an open source project but feel inadequate, try and politely work with them to nudge them into making it easier for new developers to contribute. Document the process of getting a working environment setup, including getting things like Vagrant setup if needed. Most projects will welcome attempts to try and make it easier for new developers. And, well, if they don't, then find a better project. ;-)

(If you think your coding really does suck, we've got an encyclopedia with lots of loose ends that need tying up. Just sayin'.)

Matthew 6:1-4

Reply on news.ycombinator.com