gpg 1.4
Robert J. Hansen
rjh at sixdemonbag.org
Sat Jan 17 01:46:36 CET 2026
> Which segment of users are these?
>
> That's not a sarcastic question. It's a sincere one.
Ironically, I ran across a commentator today who had a paragraph almost
precisely on point here. (Anyone trying to infer my own politics from
the fact I'm citing Jonah Goldberg is, of course, living in sin. I read
from across the political spectrum.)
"One of the foundational insights of Mancur Olson,
the legendary economist, is the problem of
concentrated benefits and diffuse costs. Take sugar
subsidies. They make sugar slightly more expensive
for everybody, costing the country writ large
billions, but the subsidies reap huge profits for a
handful of domestic sugar producers. So every time
someone suggests getting rid of them, the tiny
number of Big Sugar barons starts writing checks to
politicians and starts screaming about the dangers
of not having a domestic supply of sugar in
wartime.
This dynamic is a feature of all politics. The
people who care, for whatever reason, have more
influence than those who don’t."
Likewise, FOSS needs to be careful not to let the people who speak the
loudest on mailing lists drive feature development. We really need to go
out to where the users are, meet them in their own places and
environments, and find out what's most useful to them.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 236 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <https://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-users/attachments/20260116/07067c2f/attachment.sig>
More information about the Gnupg-users
mailing list