> Never promise anything to people using your code. Even if they are paying, unless it is in a contract.

“Never” is a very strong word. What is your recommendation based upon, exactly?

This is my code. It costs me nothing to tell people my future plans with the code. It costs me nothing to tell people that my plans are most probably off. But it will gain people something - they would be able to plan for the future better.

“Politeness costs nothing and gains everything” - is a better theorem (than yours one). I would rather tell it as: politeness usually costs nothing and gains at least something, but that’s just an engineer correcting a salesman’s statement.

Yep. The “this software is distributed as is, with no guarantees…” is essential in any kind of freelance open source development. That sentence does not appear in the BSD licenses and I deem that a mistake.

1. That’s a great illustration why socialism does not work. When everyone gets a regulated paycheck, everyone thinks they are underpaid. No one in the whole country is paid _extremely generously_. So people kinda disappear from their working places, even when they are honestly sitting on a chair assigned.

2. But. Even in a socialist country there is always a bunch of people who love their job more than a paycheck. Let’s call them “real professionals”. They just love to get things done.

3. When a real professional comes to a capitalist country he sees that there is a huge demand for their services and no real competition. Cause a lot of capable people virtually disappear whenever they damn well please unless they are paid _extremely generously_ for their work. For example:

4. Our customer was complaining that they have too many problems with our software. I was sent to look into that. When I arrived their CTO demonstratively unscrewed the plate with the name of our company from the door of the room I was assigned to. Shrug. Working. Issue #1, issue #2, … issue #23. Sound customers hear while connecting through our switch goes up, then down, then up, then down… Investigation revealed that one department under the CTO bought their voice files from one vendor, the other department under the CTO bought their files from another vendor. One bunch was twice as loud as another.

Now, neither vendor was going to do anything about that unless they are paid extremely well for the additional job. Neither department was going to do anything about their files unless they are paid extremely well for their work (actually they were demanding each other blood, but you can consider it just a kind of currency). I scratched my head. It is definitely not our job, we just connect a source to a destination. But. Actually our software can see which department a voice file comes from. I am going to give you an option: based on a voice file source you will be able to adjust the volume by a configured amount. And this configuration can be changed in real time, so basically you will have a volume knob you can adjust while software runs.

It took 15 minutes to code and a week of QA, which does not count since it is always a week of QA. Anyway in a week issue #23 was gone. Next.

In four months the CTO told me that in 15 years in the tech industry he never saw a company as aggressive as ours. The definition “aggressive” gave me a pause. Nothing we did seemed “aggressive” to me. We humbly listened to the problems and did our best to help, without sorting “our problem” or “not our problem”. It’s kind of opposite to “aggressive”, no?

5. A customer from that F..<something> list of big companies that is often thrown around but I could not remember it exactly told me once that when something happens, they pray (as in pray to God) that it was our company fault. Or, if not - that we were able to find a workaround.

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So of cause, go ahead - disappear unless you are paid extremely well for your work. Even if that work is dropping a line warning people that your plans have changed. Such a widespread attitude gets me paid extremely well. Kinda ironic, no?