Random Musings

I will be the first one to acknowledge that I am a bad businessman. I have squandered away a considerable portion of my inhertance due to my inability to have an instinctive grasp of the value of money. Evolutionarily speaking, this might appear strange at first, but it isn’t. I consider myself a warrior, and in the past, for people like me, cogitating on the nuances of economics wasn’t a profitable enterprise. My ancestors were nobility, and our primary job was to kill and be killed on the battlefield. The petty details of day to day balancing of accounts was a chore that was left to the merchant class.

And I am not even alone. The lack of business acumen is indeed a trait found in many men throughout history, and most were actually proud of their lack of ability in matters financial. I currently survive solely owing to the fact that I can do around 100 people’s work single handedly. All my attempts to make money out of other people’s efforts have been a failure.

Now that I have explained the premise, let me get on with the latest of my escapades, involving a donation of $200 to one of the open source projects, which later turned sour when the developer–a guy named Colin Harrison– turned out to be a low life, who was without a smidgen of self-respect. The imbecile even has a website: straightrunning.com

The reason I made the donation was that I needed a specific feature in that software, and it is a norm in the open source development model that you can get specific features implemented by sponsoring them, and thus my intention was not actually donation, but rather sponsor the particular feature. As usual, I payed in advance. The reason for this was that I was desperate for the feature, since it was pivotal to my porting my development environment from Linux to Windows, and I had thought that making the donation initially would engender a larger responsibility in him (which is what would have happened if it was me in his position), and even if he found it impossible to implement the feature, then naturally what any self-respecting person would do is return the money. Thus my actions were all ultimately based on the assumption that the guy in question was intelligent person, and with intelligence–at least according to my own theory–should come the sense of ethics.

But it turned out to be a wrong assumption. When I pointed out to him that if he was incapable of implementing the simple feature I had requested, he was ethically obligated to refund my donation, he just deleted my post and shut down the entire forum. But fortunately it happened at the public repository of sourceforge.net and I was able to open a complaint and bring it to the attention of everyone. You can see my post, colin’s semi-coherent replies and my response here.

My complaint at Sourceforge

After I called attention to the fact that his pathetically holding on to the $200 was worse than how a New York Beggar would behave, he has slinked away, and what can one do when a person prefers getting publicly excoriated rather than give up a measly couple of hundred dollars?

But Colin is going to learn a really hard lesson. Behaving unethically with people who are cavalier with money is a bad idea. The reason for his despicable conduct is that I was disproportionately polite with him initially, which the semi-evolved simian mistook as a sign of my weak character. His conduct is typical of a chimpanzee, which are incapable of recognizing that somebody is being polite merely on account of formality, and may not have anything to do with the person being nice.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 5th, 2007 at 3:27 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.