It might be American funny. It might even be German funny. But it’s not really funny.
(Pause while you refresh your notion of “funny” by watching a sitcom. I recommend anything by the BBC post 2001 or so.)
It’s not Yiddish funny (which I think is crucial) and it’s not Pirahã/Hi’aiti’ihi’ funny. One, two, where did we start from again?
More importantly, it’s irrelevant. You swap carbon emission permits as a fiat currency (true: it’s broken). You don’t swap broken code. You don’t swap broken code paradigms (insert language or methodology here). You don’t swap idiot co-workers, and even more importantly, you have no way of swapping the 80% of idiots who coded before you.
None whatsoever. I’d pay big bucks for that.
Like they say in Chicago, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?”
Two words: Impedance Mismatch.
Now, if you can figure out how to trade on that … then you’ve got a winner.
“When you take away the comical facade of the offsets, you basically just have a marketing campaign to donate money to a foundation / brotherhood / gaggle of programmers…”
Love the idea!
Although some “developers” would need something more like a blank cheque, hehe.
I hope all these efforts will help to dilute bad smells in Internet.
I want to know how many ppl will buy these…
So if people start buy these offsets…does it means we have solution to fix bad code…
I dont think so…Use the brain to fix bad code…not money…
@John Rasch I wouldn’t know jQuery if it fell on my foot (out of a webpage, I suppose), and ant & svn definitely cost me more than $1.50 each in frustration. I do pretty plainly refuse to use them both together on a single module/project.
@SW Because they are social objects, not commercial ones. The moment you start selling, the support goes away.
What about offering “Theft for my own good” offsets for politicians? Or “Merit taken for someone else’s actions” offsets for management? That’s totally not fair, also because we’re doing so much less damage than those guys…
But that’s the internetz anyways, so nice joke and that’s a fun way to help OS projects… because you’re not making any profit out of this, are you?
To summarize, you want those of us who earn a living writing code to subsidise those who give their work away for free, jeopardizing our own jobs in the process.
What I don’t get is why if these open source projects are so much better, why don’t they finance themselves by selling on the open market?
Jeez… what a naive idea! Like someone would just give away 5k in return for a jpeg file and the hope that it will be used to improve the quality of open source code. Give me a break.
Spend the money on Visual Studio 2008 and few re factoring tools. Much better investment if you ask me.
I have come to the realization that there is obvious bad code but then there is code that is good based on usage. By that I mean, sometimes reducing 5 lines of code down to a small segment of code doing the same thing more efficiently isn’t always a good thing, unless you are absolutely positively sure that chunk of code will never need to do anything else but what it does today and there is no need to edit it.
Sure it’s a fun little exercise for the programmer but it doesn’t always lead to productivity in the work place especially when you have several people maintaining that code. And the code that was written yesterday based on a specific need has to implement a few more needs today.
There is nothing worse they wasting time deciphering someone else’s code and then retrofitting it’s narrow because they were striving for the less is more golden chalice. This can be argued on both sides but I find simple basic easy to read code is often the better way to go, in applications that get revised often by multiple people, each with their own style of coding.
I guess what I’m saying is, sometimes beautiful code is in the eye of the beholder.
I, a dev behind the code offsets site, am utterly bedazzled by the comments I am reading here… let me list a few responses to some of these typical ones:
“Why wouldn’t I just donate to the projects directly?”
Nothing wrong with that at all as they’re getting the same amount of money either way. 100% of the proceeds (read “the sale”) go to the project you choose. At least now you have something amusing to hand out in your next code review, tack to your cubicle, or hand to the guy who breaks the build.
“I don’t make enough money, these are too expensive, no one would buy $1000 worth, etc.”
The higher amounts are for amusement only, no one is expected to actually purchase them. If you cannot afford $1.50 for 3 of these things, I don’t even know how to respond to that. I’m sure you’ve gotten at least $1.50 in value out of jQuery, for example.
“I would rather donate to project X…”
Please do so, that’s all we’re encouraging here. If you want some offsets for your trouble, use the contact form on the site and suggest the project you’d like to add to our list.
“Aren’t there better ways to promote these projects?”
There may be different ways, but “better” is a subjective term. If I were on the receiving end of free money, I wouldn’t be too upset about it. At this point, it’s given the projects at least some free press.
“Feed the homeless instead of buying these, if only the money went to help poor people in the inner city, etc.”
Who says I can’t do both? There are plenty of charities you can donate to if this is what you desire.
In the end, the complete pompousness displayed in the verbiage of the site is mere satire. Yes, we’re aware that it doesn’t work exactly like carbon offsets - that is irrelevant. The site is meant to be a fun and joking way to increase awareness for these types of projects.
and that’s a fun way to help OS projects… because you’re not making any profit out of this, are you?