jasmith@watcgl.waterloo.edu (Jeff Smith) (02/01/89)
Well folks, I just read a posting from Karl Lehenbauer (sp?) on ..tech. He
was simply wondering if anybody had tried the memory-leak stuff he posted
to sources. But this made me ask the question "Why does he have to ask?"
It is possible that what I am about to suggest is already a part of every-body
elses daily practice and I am just an uncultured, uncouth slob, but I'll take
the risk anyway. If you already do this, you can ignore the following diatribe.
When somebody posts useful routines/programs to the net (particularly when they
post source) they go to some non-zero time and effort on the behalf of the
general net populace and ask nothing in return. That is all well understood.
In 'real life' when somebody gives you something, it is seldom without any
expectation of recompense. Even so, we always say "thankyou". Why don't we
do this on the net as well?
If you download something, why not take the time to send the author a thankyou?
I suspect that many people wait to see if its useful and then perhaps post
some kind of comment to the net if the whatever warrants such comments. But in
many cases, comments like that are not sufficiently interesting to bother the
net with, so we send nothing. At least an e-mail thankyou to the author from
everybody who downloads it will give him some feedback on the distribution
his work received. And if you find that you do or don't like the stuff, you
could follow up later with comments.
After all, if they're going share their efforts, why can't we at least
pay them back with a little ego-boosting thanks?
Smitty ...{sun!vedge | watmath}!watcgl!jasmith
".signature is on vacation"