People can still pursue their hobbies and sharpen their programming skills by working on more productive issues that exist. While you could call my comment whining, if it is able to change maybe even one person's opinion on the utility of this work it could help lead to a bigger reprioritization of people's time allowing for more important issues that affect real users to be addressed instead.

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justivy 20 hours ago | parent [-]

>People can still pursue their hobbies and sharpen their programming skills by working on more productive issues that exist.

No, they can't. People pursue things that interest them, if it isn't interesting they wouldn't do it at all.

This is similar to "why donate to cause X when cause Y is much more important?" well if cause X didn't exist, those people likely wouldn't donate at all, so it's not really an opportunity cost.

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charcircuit 20 hours ago | parent [-]

Except I'm not saying there is only X and Y. I'm saying there is AAAAA-ZZZZZ and people working on problem XYZAB would be able to help actually push these operating systems forward if they chose another problem they also found interesting. I do not believe that it is only possible for these people to be interested in a single problem. I think these people can be motivated to find another problem more interesting.

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justivy 19 hours ago | parent [-]

> I think these people can be motivated to find another problem more interesting.

You can pay them I guess, usually a good motivator.

	▲	charcircuit 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That is one way, but there are other ways to motivate and demotivate people.