LinuxHater is an effective man. His blog is like a car-wreck you can't peel your horrified eyes away from despite your desire to maintain a sense of decency and the terrible knowledge that you will be haunted by disgust for days afterward. It's damn hard to stop reading his crap.

Anyway, in much the same way that watching the Special Olympics makes us ponder our own humanity, LinuxHater has compelled me to think about what makes FOSS fundamentally different than proprietary software.

First of all, ask yourself, why the hell would anyone write software for free? I mean, writing software is hard in general and you can actually get paid to do it. What kind of moron gives it away? Here's a suggestion: ask your wife/girlfriend why she doesn't charge you for sex. After all, there's clearly a market and, regardless of what you might like to believe, having sex with you isn't likely the pinnacle of sexual experience for a woman. Still, she does it. There's some inexplicable driving force that causes an otherwise sane person to want to get sweaty with your fat ass. We refer to this phenomenon as "love", probably for lack of a more rational explanation.

Free software is driven by a similar force. Software developers, like women, come in two handy flavors: the ones who do it for love of the task, and Professionals. Now, I have nothing against professionals, but there is a very, very small intersection of people who are both paid to do something and love what they are doing. This means that most of the people who write "professional" software hate their jobs. In contrast, I'd be amazed to find the open source contributor who doesn't love his job. This doesn't mean that the the open source developer doesn't face the same frustrations as the professional developer, only that they are differently motivated and one's expectations of them should be different than a professional. To illustrate this point, consider again your wife or girlfriend (or "life partner" for you fruity-rainbow Mac folks). There are certain, um "tasks" that are almost exclusively the realm of professionals. So when a free software developer tells you in no uncertain terms that he's not going to bend over for you, perhaps you should take it with the same disappointed silence you do when your wife declines to do that thing you saw on while browsing thumbnail sites or maybe, just maybe you might help taking take out the trash now and again you lazy bastard.

You might just get lucky.