On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 11:45 AM, Steve Summit <scs(a)eskimo.com> wrote:
Anthony wrote:
On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 6:59 PM, George Herbert
<
george.herbert(a)gmail.com>wroteote:
But the
community would rip itself apart and a large portion of those
involved would leave, forking and never coming back.
I think there's a very good chance that you're right, but this strikes me
as so incredibly irrational that I have trouble accepting that it's the
only possible scenario.
You're entitled to your POV, but please don't make it sound as if
those who don't share it are irrational.
It's not my intention to claim that anyone who doesn't share "my POV"
(whatever that means) is irrational, but I do believe that *if* the
community ripped itself apart over the introduction of ads that this would
be based on the irrational.
The reason people hate ads is that they would make our content
non-free.
Not if the ads were released under a free license.
Instead of saying, "here's some stuff we give you
altruistically, out of the goodness of our hearts, use it however
you wish", we'd be saying, "here's some stuff you can have, but
only if you look at this ad first." It doesn't matter how
tasteful or unobtrusive or hideable an ad is; the very fact that
it's there fundamentally changes the nature of the transaction.
"Here's some stuff we give you altruistically, out of the goodness of our
hearts, use it however you wish" would be an irrational transaction in the
first place. So this argument only suffices to enhance my belief that this
anti-ad position is based in the irrational. Incidentally, I wonder how you
reconcile the position that this "stuff" is to use "however you wish"
with
the fact that you are arguing to restrict its use to only ad-free uses.