Monthly Archives: May 2008

Participating in Firefox Download Day 2008

Download DayFirefox so far has helped me during the development of web application, especially its Firebug extension and Session manager and also give me the notion of standardized views of W3-compliant pages. There are some drawbacks though, which one of them might be clear and settled for a while, the increasing memory footprint while running Firefox for significant time.

While the Firefox devs have promised to address the problems and envisioned a better browsing experience, I was informed about their campaign entitled “Firefox Download Day 2008” which is aimed to break the world record of total downloads in a day.

As my gratitude for what Firefox has given me and what Firefox devs have done so far, I decided to participate in this program.

And if you are also a Firefox fan and want to join this campaign, feel free to visit the page: http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/

Voluntary Work Infers No Copyright?

As a developer, what makes you decide to get involved in a project? Is it the financial benefit after accomplishing the project? In term of commercial project, this might be true because executing project is another means to make a living, hence financial income is reasonable outcome. However, in non-commercial projects which are usually open source and the project takers are not paid on monthly basis, paid on a little sum of money, or even unpaid at all, it’s apparently unreasonable to lean on immediate financial benefit such that it’s practical to draw conclusion that the involvement is based on other motive.

There are various reasons why somebody decides to chime in a non-commercial project. While the list of specific reasons may bubble up, I summarize that it’s mainly personal interest. Spending significant time in an activity without tangible profit while there is clear acknowledgement that the time slot is convertible into tangible profit, it’s not logical to take such decision, given that there are options to go through and choices are freely made. Thus, there has to be illogical reason to make it logical and it comes from personal interest, emotional binding, a part of human nature, that can not be simply formulated into a set of theorems.

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