Fun eMusic/J related correspondence

eythianeythian
in General
I don't usually hear much from the users of eMusic/J, the occasional "thanks" email, or once-or-twice a year notification from paypal that someone kicked $5 my way. But this is a first:



at the moment, I have the following reply sitting unsent in my "Drafts" mailbox:

emusic/j is free and open source software, which I wrote because it was
useful to me, and released at no cost because it was maybe useful to others.

On one hand, if you look at section 11 of the copyright licence:

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~eythian/emusicj/trunk/view/head:/doc/COPYING

you'll see there is no warranty.

On the other hand, as the software is free (as in speech), the source
code is available and it is legally permissible (encouraged, even!) for
you to modify it, or get someone else to do so, in order to make it
better suit your needs. The only proviso is that if you do that, and you
pass it on to someone else, you must in turn give them the same freedom
to improve and copy that I gave you.

Essentially, I have freely provided the program to you just in case it
was useful. Constructive criticism and input is welcome, but plain old
gift-horse mouth-looking is neither necessary nor desired.

Cheers, Robin.

Too snarky? Not snarky enough? I may have a little bit of a problem with people getting shitty about something I gave them for free :)

Comments

  • jackedUPjazzjackedUPjazz
    I think you have nailed it perfectly, in a word, elegant, is how I would describe.

    Send it on



  • PaulRPaulR
    You could point out that their message contain nothing to indicate what their problem was/is, so there is nothing you can do to help them.
  • DoofyDoofy
  • greggreg
    You can tell her that I am a very happy emusicj user; after many, many hours of frustration after emusic's own downloader stopped working for me, emuiscj solved all my downloading problems. A couple of queries though. How did she come across emusicj, and therefore is she genuine?
  • ScissorManScissorMan
    edited November 2016
    I'm going to go against the general consensus and say that as a shareware author, you'll be letting the side down if you get too snarky with Dr. Phyllis here. It's no big deal and it's really just one person who hasn't even explained what the problem is, but the proper thing to do is just point out that many others are having no problems with the program, and what she's presumably experiencing is likely to be due to a driver/memory conflict that's specific to her individual computer. And if she helpfully sends you some actual details you'll look at them, but that you can't make any assurances since lots of computers have oddball configurations and you're just one guy who for practical reasons can't test in all conceivable computing environments. (This has the benefit of being the truth, after all.)

    If she's still pissy after that, then you give her the what-for. But the first response has to be polite, or it makes everyone else look bad. And remember, she could be a popular blogger or even a real media person, for all we know.

    I'm just sayin'!
  • eythianeythian
    @ScissorMan yeah, it's still unset :) tbh the writing of it was mostly therapeutic.
  • GermanprofGermanprof
    My first thought was that it's remarkable the lack of communication skills that can go along with an advanced degree, of that Dr is legit.
  • jackedUPjazzjackedUPjazz
    edited November 2016
    I disagree ScissorMan, the language of the response was not particularly snarky, although quite direct and to the point.  In a word, it was an education for the good doctor which he/she/it apparently missed out on during his/her doctoral studies.

    What you have done by not sending it is left an idiot intact to float throughout the universe until he/she/it comes in contact with the likes of me.  I promise you that interaction will not be nearly as delicate.

    So I would argue that it is an act of love to explain the facts of life to this confused soul.

    Remember, only you can prevent forest fires



  • eythianeythian
    edited November 2016
    OK, I typically get about 1 emusic/j related email per year. In the past two or so months, I've had about four or five. Anyone have any idea what's going on? Suppose I could have a look at my webserver logs to see where people are coming from... (Alas, none of these people seem to be hitting the "donate" button :)

    Edit: looking back a through the logs, I see: http://www.emusic.com/dlm/download.html though I can't see it linking to it at the moment. Maybe they changed it.


  • greggreg
    After upgrading to Windows 10 I had problems with emu's DLM6 that they could not resolve, hence moving to emusicj. Maybe others have had problems too?
  • GermanprofGermanprof
    There's a message on emusic about the latest downloader not working for Mac users - might that have sent folk looking for an alternative?
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