The RedState website, as political forum websites do from time to time, is making a fundraising appeal. It goes without saying that they need the money to fight the good fight against the liberal hordes… but their angle in presenting this aspect of the struggle is, er, unusual:
So… they can’t find any right-wingers who can figure out how to fix their computers, and the evil liberals are sabotaging their efforts to stay on teh interwebs. :dubious:
(Posted to The BBQ Pit on the theory that it’ll end up there within a dozen posts anyway.)
If the bloggers can’t find anyone willing to donate funds/labor to their cause, may I suggest they give a tug on the bootstraps so beloved of conservative rhetoricians and get busy learning Scoop themselves?
That’s the problem. Open-source apps are notoriously supported by the granola-munching, hippie-consciousness, we-should-share-everything-on-Spaceship-Earth Liberal Left; right-wingers like commerical, proprietary products.
So, you’re saying that the trouble these conservatives find themselves in is not their fault, but rather the fault of environmental factors or other things beyond their control? Are you suggesting that looking at the cause of their failure is here appropriate, and that said causes might even mitigate the responsibility they bear for their failures?
It makes perfect sense to me. They choose Scoop, then Scoop has problems, then they expect free help from people who disagree with them. Surprisingly, their political adversaries decline to help.
Conservatives have rejected campaign reforms many times with the canard that “money is free speech”. So it stands to reason that the reverse is true - free speech is money… and thus RedState is essentially griping because liberals won’t fund them. And the rationale, get this, the rationale is essentially - “we can’t do it ourselves because there aren’t enough smart conservatives.” True, but whose problem is that?
It never ceases to amaze me how conservatives twist any issue into "Liberals say , but look at them doing [something that doesn’t remotely resemble X unless you twist it until it whimpers]! They’re a bunch of hypocrites!
This doesn’t sound like most software developers I know. If you told them about a problem you were having with their software, they wouldn’t start an inquisition about what you were using the software to do (except as needed to understand the problem)- they’d just try to fix the problem.
Did these guys insist on only getting help from a conservative Scoop developer? Or did they say something to antagonize the developers?
Or maybe they’re trying to get the job done as free volunteer work (in which case there’s no point asking people who don’t support RedState’s mission).
But a lot of open-source software developers do their development on their own time, are not paid for it, and put the software out for the benefit of anyone who wants to use it. They develop the software and fix bugs as free volunteer work all the time.
What I could see here is that RedState made some unreasonable request of the developers (“Rewrite the whole thing in Visual Basic for us”). Or maybe they made some feature request that the developers decided wasn’t something they were going to do- this kind of decision gets made on software projects, free/open source and otherwise, all the time. Or maybe they asked some question that they could have found the answer to in the documentation or a FAQ, and someone told them so. Or maybe the developers just didn’t give them the answer to their question that they wanted (“You won’t be able to run that on the hardware you have- you’ll need to upgrade”). Then the RedState bloggers jumped to the conclusion that the developers rejected their request because they don’t agree with RedState’s politics.
That’s hilariously pathetic. I’ve always found it amazing that anyone can whine about open source software they’re using for free. To go so far as to imply that developers are obligated to ensure you can use their software in the manner you want or else are restricting free speech and open debate is so painfully retarded you can’t do anything but laugh.
