Surrender is not resignation, it is acceptance. You have to acknowledge and then emotionally accept what truly is, in order to be able to effectively construct a different future.

Then one evening about 10 years later I was at a festival wandering around and I had this desire in my brain for something, I didn't know what, and it was a few hours later that I realized the thing I really wanted was a cigarette. It was that night that I changed my internal conception of myself from "ex-smoker" to "non-smoker". I don't have cravings any more for cigarettes, though there is a certain pang, I guess I would call it "nostalgia", and maybe it includes "envy" of people who can smoke a cigarette/cigar socially at an event and then not think about it again for years. Occasionally I will have accidental contact with nicotine (like buying a joint on vacation and getting a weird taste while smoking it and realizing half-way through that it's actually a spliff), and for a few days or a week afterward the light switch is again visible in my mind--though I'm thankfully not tempted to flip it. I wonder in those times whether a never-smoker who has a cigar once does have the same cravings in the days after, but doesn't recognize them as such.

So at least for me, who admittedly was never a heavy smoker, it doesn't resonate that I will struggle with this addiction until I die. The only apparent lasting (mental) consequences are that I have to consciously refuse nicotine even when it would be a legitimately fun and interesting experience (like when I was offered some fancy snuff at a party which everyone else got to enjoy). And when I see someone smoking a cigarette I might get the nostalgia or envy I mentioned above. But when I get within smelling distance it's just foul and unappealing.

Best wishes for anyone who's thinking of or trying to quit.

They're doing the fun part (coding) for free. It's well-known that developers don't like writing documentation (esp "properly" which is ill-defined and for some definitions can be a much larger task than writing the code in the first place); in fact, does anyone enjoy writing docs as much as an engineer enjoys writing code?

So this makes total sense to me. As a user of free software, you can choose: a) pay for a commercial package with comes with docs; b) use free software, and pay for the docs in the form of a book (perhaps waiting a few years until lots of people want to do the same); c) use free software and figure it out from breadcrumbs the developer left in whatever forums they use; d) (c) but then step up and write some docs.

Too many people think that free/libre software is supposed to be like commercial software, only better, but it's not the case. It's definitely better in the "libre" way, and of course cheaper in the "price" way, but it's usually not packaged for easy consumption, nor is the developer going to do a bunch of work they don't enjoy for other people who don't want to pay them for it.

Does GPL ever work this way? In practice, GPL discourages corporate (=widespread) adoption, driving down the quality of open-source software, and creating the market for paid closed-source software (which is often worse than open-source software, but packaged better). I'd love to see cases where a GPL-dev successfully negotiates a reasonable "cost-plus" arrangement with a company for a non-free license.

Your analysis of the MIT license is spot-on, btw.

The difference between "nobody has gone through this entire list" and "somebody has gone through this entire list" is huge.