The future of KGS

[Joaz Banbeck]

Joaz, this is not the first time I've been disappointed to see you turn up in an interesting thread about a complex issue, throw curt one-liners at someone you disagreed with, and turn it into a battle of obnoxiousness. At least reply to deja's point properly if you disagree. It is no more commendable (though admittedly it's understandable) that deja has started replying in kind. I enjoyed the conversation about KGS, without all the patronising emoticons.

It is not a complex issue. And I use one-liners because one line is all that is needed to describe the core issue.

The core issue is simply: does wms - who has done good things for others - have an obligation to continue to do so? Deja argues that he does.

I say that Deja's arument is fallacious, and that question has been raised before, in many contexts. It has been raised so often that it does have a proper name.

[billywoods]

The core issue is simply: does wms - who has done good things for others - have an obligation to continue to do so?

I don't think that's the core issue of the conversation I was having at all. The discussion was much more interesting before you skim-read it, failed or refused to engage with it properly, patronisingly informed us of trivial facts about legal obligation (or other things we weren't talking about), and called us socialists. In any case, if you don't wish to have the conversation we were having, that's okay, but could we get back to it now, please?

For reference,

does wms ... have an obligation to continue to do so? Deja argues that he does.

I take the point to be not that WMS has an obligation to deja as a matter of ethical theory, but that WMS would have an obligation if he chose to recognize one, and since he has chosen not to recognize one, deja does not wish to play on his server.

The point, as far as I see it, is that "obligation" is a pretty complex term. Of course the conversation becomes trivial and uninteresting if you define it to mean legal obligation. So, you know, please stop doing that, because that's not what I was doing, and I don't think it's what jts or deja were doing.

[HermanHiddema]

And while everyone here is bickering and whining, wms has taken five weeks off from his day job to work full time on the HTML client.

[Javaness2]

And while everyone here is bickering and whining, wms has taken five weeks off from his day job to work full time on the HTML client.

But this is the example of nothing that we are talking about.

[Bonobo]

...and people would be less likely to stumble into the socialist fallacy.

I was wondering when this shibboleth would raise its head. Well done, Joaz.

Well, IMNSHO this is rather a violation of L19’s ToS, isn’t it?

[Joaz Banbeck]

...
The point, as far as I see it, is that "obligation" is a pretty complex term. Of course the conversation becomes trivial and uninteresting if you define it to mean legal obligation. So, you know, please stop doing that, because that's not what I was doing, and I don't think it's what jts or deja were doing.

I assure you, I do understand the point. You and other posters indulge in complex discussions of obligation.

I claim that no such obligation exists, in any form whatsoever, legal or otherwise. And even if wms were to decide to recognize one, he would be mistaken in doing so.

[Bantari]

And we don't owe anyone gratitude?

As deja says, gratitude is reserved for those who do things for me. Of course, wms took the initiative to create KGS and spent a lot of time and effort on it. That deserves huge amounts of respect. But gratitude is a little different. He's not doing anything for us. The most striking example of his hands-off approach, in my opinion, is how he is happily watching kaya spend years and huge amounts of effort building itself up from scratch, gratuitously repeating all of his hard work, because he can't be bothered either to maintain or to release his code. If that's not a vulgar example of disregard for the go community, I don't know what is.

I think we agree to disagree here.
Paramedics come to help your old dad when he has a heart attack... are you grateful? They are just doing their job, after all, they are not doing it "for you." Your house is on fire, and firemen put it down - are you grateful to them? They din't really do it "for you", they are getting paid for that. Doctor heals your bad foot... Policeman recovers your stolen posessions... The lady at unemployment office finds you a great job... And so on... Plenty of times people do stuff "for you" and yet not "for you" - might depend on how you define it. But I'd say gratitude is ok in all such cases. Saying "Thank You" and not being rude is pretty much mandatory according to what I understand of our social convention.

Or do you just go through life expecting and demanding that others do stuff for you always?

With wms - you can argue that he wrote KGS for himself, just because he felt like it. And then he goes on and ignores your great improvement ideas, or whatever. Still, there is a lot of things he does on day-to-day bases wrt running KGS from which you benefit. A lot of that maintenance stuff is not fun, and at this point - yes, he is doing it probably because of what Kirby and deja are talking about - he feels "obligated" to do it. But this obligation is misplaced, and he certainly is not required to do it.

I mean - I understand that wms' attitudes can sometimes be weird, and the admins can be outright bad, I have no argument with that. Have been on receiving end of all of that myself, and I know it can hurt. Still, this is no reason to behave the way some people do.

My main point here is this:
Somebody gives you something for nothing, and you needed this something very much (even if you need it less now) - then regardless of what "the other motives" of the giver were, being grateful to him/her is certainly appropriate. You don't need to glorify the giver or build pedestals for him/her or ignore all his/her faults - but being grateful is reasonable. Saying "thank you" is very good taste, in my book. Being grumpy and fussy and demanding more, is not. You don't have to use the service, but bashing it because it is not *exactly* what you want is just bad taste.

Especially when you understand how rarely in life you get things for free like that. To me, people who don't understand the above are people who are so spoiled that they not only expect stuff for free, but somehow think that each time they get it they have the right to demand more instead of saying "thank you".

In Go, as in real life - if somebody works hard to give you something for free, something that you want very much, the appropriate response is 'Thank you, Sir!' and gratitude.

Right, but there's a flip side to that. In go, as in real life, when there is an important task that needs doing that many people are capable of doing, and you raise your hand and say "ooh, ooh, pick me!", and everyone allows you to take responsibility for this important task because you seem like you'll do a good job, it is not acceptable to spend a long time half-doing the job, get bored, turn out something half-baked, and relinquish all responsibility for the bad bits and omissions and still expect praise for the good bits. If you volunteered to be charged with a task, it's your duty to see it through.

Stones not clicking is a complete non-issue, but every Java update threatens to be the death of KGS, and a lag of 10 seconds (as I had today) is just not workable. For all we know, these might be the death throes of KGS. If so, and even if not, in practice we've ended up in the kaya situation I mentioned above. At best, one of kaya and KGS will become great (and development of the other will have been a waste of time); at worst, kaya will be abandoned and KGS will continue to break.

I don't remember wms raising his hand and saying "ooh, ooh, pick me!" My recollection is that he build KGS and said "here, have fun, this is what I can do for you, and its free" and then he also explained that KGS is a one-man show and that because of that there are certain limitations of what can be done and how fast. So basically - take it for what it is, wms' toy we can all play with - and have played with for years! And I think that, feature for feature, KGS is a really decent toy, all things considered.

I also never heard wms expecting praise for any bits, good or otherwise. I mean... I am really not sure what you are talking about. Can you point me to any threads/posts where any of that happened?

From my recollection, wms has been more responsive to request and bug fixes in the past, this is true. But I can imagine that after what - over 10 years? - of single-handedly running the server he gets bored with that. I would, for sure. To me this is not really a sign that KGS is bad, or wms is a tyrant, just that maybe its time for somebody else to take over and for KGS to retire and wms to take a long-deserved vacation. Personally - I have had big hopes for Kaya, but this does not look to hot right now...

I agree with you that KGS might be in its "death throes", as I said - I had great hopes for Kaya. The Java updaes argument you make is very valid. What I do not agree with is that, death throes or not, I really dislike the attitude of bashing something and someone just because, after years of mostly good service, they might have starting to outlive their usefulness and getting outdated. This is just bad taste to me. Not saying you are doing it, just generally - it happens, even in this thread.

I think that whichever service/server you get, eventually it will become old, tired, outdated, and with too much inertia in the code for agile changes on a whim. Will you turn on those services then too? Why should anybody write anything then, if this is the thanks they invariably get?

Or it might be that wms just neglects the Java client because he works hard on the web client.
Again - limited resources... I think people can do without click soude for a while, really...

But time will tell.
All I know that, good or bad times, we have had our fun, and for that I am grateful.
And if we will have more good time in the future, for that I will be grateful as well.

[billywoods]

I claim that no such obligation exists, in any form whatsoever, legal or otherwise. And even if wms were to decide to recognize one, he would be mistaken in doing so.

I can see that that's what you're claiming. I've made lengthy posts to the contrary. My understanding of the situation is rather confused, and I'm open to being convinced, which is why I'm here. If you'd like to discuss it with me, great. But making brusque responses containing more insults than logical reasoning is not the way to do so. No matter how obvious you think your point of view is, you are talking to other intelligent human beings who have thought about the situation and respectfully disagree. It would do us all some good to remember that.

[Joaz Banbeck]

I claim that no such obligation exists, in any form whatsoever, legal or otherwise. And even if wms were to decide to recognize one, he would be mistaken in doing so.

I can see that that's what you're claiming. I've made lengthy posts to the contrary. My understanding of the situation is rather confused, and I'm open to being convinced, which is why I'm here. If you'd like to discuss it with me, great. But making brusque responses containing more insults than logical reasoning is not the way to do so. No matter how obvious you think your point of view is, you are talking to other intelligent human beings who have thought about the situation and respectfully disagree. It would do us all some good to remember that.

No insult was intended. If I did insult, I apologize.

Sometimes I write briefly. I do so assuming that others are indeed intelligent human beings, and do not need all the details spelled out for them.

[PaperTiger]

And while everyone here is bickering and whining, wms has taken five weeks off from his day job to work full time on the HTML client.

Now imagine if he had found an hour after work or on the weekend within the past year to fix something as fundamental as stone sounds not working. It really is that trivial, as somebody managed to patch the compiled bytecode to call the API that works instead of the one that doesn't.

I don't even know what to make of this claim that he took 5 weeks off from work to code the HTML client. It sounds bizarre in the extreme considering the past several years of indifference.

Also, don't forget that WMS doesn't do all of this stuff out of the goodness of his heart. He did attempt to make money with KGS (KGS+ and advertising), though it obviously hasn't made him rich or able to work on KGS full time. There's nothing wrong with that, but it tends to be forgotten or claimed as something that is being done "for us".

[Bantari]

My understanding of the situation is rather confused, and I'm open to being convinced, which is why I'm here. If you'd like to discuss it with me, great.

Let me take a crack at dispelling this confusion. Consider two situations:

Situation #1:
When a community is looking for volunteers to create a certain specific toy, including future maintenance and costs and stuff, and when you, as you present it, raise your hand and yell "ooh, ooh, pick me!" - then indeed, I would say that, if chosen, you do have certain moral obligations to fulfill your end of the bargain and do what you agreed to. And if you fail and get lazy - there are reasons for being displeased with you. Provided nothing unexpected happened and you had all the info up front - in other words, you went into it with open eyes. So in this case the obligation is on you as the toy's owner and creator.

Situation #2:
Nobody asks for nothing, but you still go and create a kick-ass toy, and then surprise the community with it for Christmas, for free. The community did not even know it needed such new toy, but they immediately start playing with it and having great fun. What's more, it serves the community very good for years to no end, while you toil in the background making sure it runs and even incurring financial losses so the community keeps having fun... I would say - in this case the obligation pendlum might be shifted the other way. And gratitude towards you is appropriate - even if the toy could have been objectively better in certain ways.

From where I stand, KGS certainly fit into the category of Situation #2. And so - I disagree that we have the right to demand stuff, and than there is some heavy obligation on wms or something. I also think that the proper attitude is being grateful, regardless how old or outdated the toy has become.

At least - this is what I think.
Hope this helps.

[hyperpape]

...and people would be less likely to stumble into the socialist fallacy.

Seriously, your politics have nothing to do with this, Joaz. KGS isn't a government.

But also, it doesn't make any sense to talk about a socialist fallacy. Referring to an "x fallacy", where x is any political party or ideology, is a mistake, because fallacies are about structural weaknesses of arguments (this argument assumes what it sets out to prove), not the particular conclusions of the argument. Look at a list of fallacies. A socialist (or capitalist) fallacy would be as out of place on that list as a "Duke-basketball fallacy".

The only difference is that if I talk about the "duke-basketball fallacy", people will probably understand that its tongue in cheek, while the abuse of "fallacy" in political contexts is quite common.

[billywoods]

Paramedics come to help your old dad when he has a heart attack... are you grateful? They are just doing their job, after all, they are not doing it "for you."

I think this is something of a different situation. For a start, the emergency services are paid to do what they do. But, am I grateful to them? Of course. Am I grateful to my country for giving me them? Yes. On the flip side, would I be angry if I lived in a country with no emergency services, or if my country's emergency services suddenly got a lot worse? Of course. They're two sides of the same coin: with duty comes gratitude. The emergency services do exist for me, and everyone else; people do volunteer to be paramedics and firefighters for me. They certainly don't do it just because they need a job - they do it because they're passionate about saving lives. That's fantastic and inspirational. I'm very grateful.

Still, there is a lot of things he does on day-to-day bases wrt running KGS from which you benefit.

You don't have to use the service, but bashing it because it is not *exactly* what you want is just bad taste.

Perhaps I could have agreed with all this a few months ago, but I can't now. Stone sounds are one thing, but the lag is so bad nowadays that I barely use KGS any more, and when I do I lose my games on time!

Especially when you understand how rarely in life you get things for free like that.

I am a very strong proponent of open-source and/or free everything, which means not only that I realise the value of getting things for free, but also that I realise the power that creating things for free can have within a community. If only I was a better coder, I would very happily put time and effort into open-source projects like this myself (and those aren't entirely empty words - I'm actively working towards being a better coder in my limited spare time). But there's no point in talking about things that I haven't done, and this is a discussion for another thread anyway.

I don't remember wms raising his hand and saying "ooh, ooh, pick me!"

I wasn't around when he did, but he did, implicitly. As soon as you agreed with him that a good western go server was necessary and important, on whatever level, and whether that was before or after he had created KGS, you tacitly consented to the fact that he was the one fulfilling this necessary and important role. Maybe he created the gap in the market or maybe he just discovered it, but either way, he voluntarily filled it, and everyone voluntarily agreed that this was a good idea, and that KGS was something they could depend on. That's why he has no real rivals - every time a new server has sprung up, it has died just as fast, because everyone was happy with wms running the show and nobody needed to leave KGS. Everyone, wms included, knew about and was happy with this arrangement.

But I can imagine that after what - over 10 years? - of single-handedly running the server he gets bored with that. I would, for sure.

Me too. That's exactly why he should release his code. It's a fantastic resource just waiting to be improved by someone with the expertise and the drive to do so - wms isn't the only competent coder who likes go and has a bit of spare time on his hands. But he has to push the button first. And I would be very grateful to him if he did (and very grateful to whoever improved KGS so that I could use it again), of course, and it would prevent the gratuitous waste of time involved in developing rival go servers that I talked about earlier.

[Javaness2]

Maybe we should just stick to saying that the future of KGS will be in the upcoming HTML 5 client, and leave out the philosophy and moral essay stuff

[hyperpape]

Could some of you who think creators have no obligations[1] go tell Arno he's weak minded over here: viewtopic.php?p=133895#p133895? [2]


[1] So far as I think creators have obligations, I think wms is meeting his just fine, thank you. Even though he doesn't think he has them. But that's a theoretical point.

[2] Don't really do that.