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What I Would Do If I Ran Tarsnap

(www.kalzumeus.com)
801 points tnorthcutt | 1 comments | 03 Apr 14 16:33 UTC | HN request time: 0.209s | source
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GBond ◴[03 Apr 14 18:34 UTC] No.7525005[source]▶
There is this hole-in-the-wall looking place in NYC chinatown that serves Chinese comfort food meal. It closes real late and remains affordable while serving great meals. It is frequented by Michelin star rated restaurant chefs (of all cuisines) for the after dinners hours mostly through word-of-mouth.

Now I'm certain that the owner of the place knows he can charge more and rebrand to the mass audience. But I'd like to think it is a point of pride that his successful peers enjoy his services and that trumps any desire to change from the status quo.

He is happy being Chef2Chef and I'm glad Colin is happy being Geek2Geek.

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ixmatus ◴[03 Apr 14 22:07 UTC] No.7527293[source]▶
I am not happy with it at all.

You know what he could do with the millions Tarsnap could make him? DONATE IT TO FREEBSD. How about that being Geek2Geek? How much more better off would the world be if Colin donated $500,000.00 of his surplus income from the business to the FreeBSD foundation? Or the Python foundation? Or THE FSF?

It's infuriating how blind many intelligent people are to how much better the world would be if they allowed more money. I don't care if that ends up being them buying a new house or donating it or building another amazing business or having the money to live while they write more amazing open source software.

What if by making more money Colin is able to start another business that does unknown and amazing things for cryptography! The possibilities are endless and makes me SO ANGRY that people with such amazing knowledge and skill that is so much more than mine are SQUANDERING IT BY THINKING THEY ARE DOING THE WORLD JUSTICE BY NOT CHARGING MORE MONEY!

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koenigdavidmj ◴[03 Apr 14 22:10 UTC] No.7527318[source]▶
If you are paying less, you can do all those things.
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1. ixmatus ◴[03 Apr 14 22:26 UTC] No.7527442[source]▶
No. You cannot.

Do I donate money to certain projects of mine? Sure. When did I donate the most money? When I billed a private equity firm $300.00 per hour for development work and had a surplus of $15,000.00 dollars. I gave quite a bit to the FSF and others.

Do you really think that by charging the PE firm $50.00 per hour I would be enabling them to donate to the FSF? FreeBSD Foundation? Haskell? GNU? Do you even think they would or care? I certainly wouldn't have enough money to do so at that rate, but I did at $300.00 per hour.

Highly naive my friend. I'm sorry to be offensive but I'm sick of my intelligent peers (sometimes even more intelligent) squandering what is, a massive opportunity sitting in front of them that is being ignored for a totally ridiculous noble cause when their "noble causes" could be enhanced so much more without an iota of evil behavior.

Tarsnap isn't going to become an big evil corporation by charging more. It might if he decides to sell it, but I doubt that. It would be enabling him to do even more amazing things for software, geeks, the world, whatever. Those amazing things could be donations to enable OTHER brilliant people or it could be a new business, or new features that make backups a better experience, or it could be starting an R&D lab for crypto that pumps out purely Open Source research on cryptography that makes its way back into Tarsnap or different business.