Yeah, that is difficult. So we have a couple of different kinds of persons in this equation. I can name a handful of hackers, some high profile, pretty much all monks, who have sunk at least an hour or two on my behalf; mailing lists or bug reports. If I had to hire them or repay them, realistically, I'd be out a couple thousand bucks. This doesn’t even cover some of the help I've received here which in a couple of cases probably equalled $1,000 of my time in a single response.

But I'm not a regular end user, I'm a dev with a CPAN presence, I post tutorials here and there, and I'm a good citizen as far as bug reports and patches go. So, maybe I've saved the Perl community ten times more than I've cost it. When ikegami or creamygoodness or stvn or BrowserUK (update: fixed amusing typo) or any number of other monks and Perl folk spend an hour or two helping me they're helping others indirectly by solving problems I'm not so hot with so I have more time to solve the problems I am good at and spread that around.

Other users… I don't know. Well, now that I think of it, I read a fun article about guessers and askers recently. The gist being some people ask, not worrying about the answer, and don't think anything of it, others guess first and only ask if they think the answer is yes. You and I are guessers. It makes us polite because we don't like to impose. We won't even ask unless we think the answer is yes. This makes askers rub us wrong because when they ask, we're constrained by our attitude to either say yes or we resent being forced to say no because we don't like to be “impolite.” The asker has no concept of the perceived impropriety. He just asks, not having much of an expectation either way.

I'm all for peer pressure to be considerate though. I do think this stuff equals out pretty well already and some of the touchy spots are plain misunderstandings and differences in personality. It would be nice to see a rewards/beer/credits system on some sort of social coding site… It would take the governments of the world a few years to catch on how to tax it. :)

(update: fixed a few typos.)

In reply to Re^3: Sometimes, just saying "Thank You" is not good enough by Your Mother
in thread Sometimes, just saying "Thank You" is not good enough by Anonymous Monk

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