I'm involved in a lot of virtual communities on-line.  And one of the trends I see regularly is, if someone knows what you do for a living, inevitably they'll twist what you say to fit some sort of stereotype of the evil capitalist.

For instance, if I'm on a skin site and I say "I like your Litestep theme" it's only a matter of time before someone says "Oh you're just trying to trick him into letting you make a WindowBlinds version! Can't you ever stop trying to sell your stuff?"  Because yea, at 3pm on a Sunday afternoon that's what I'm doing, I'm scouring through websites trying to corrupt the youth to make a little extra money so that I can pay for my private yet. Sheesh.

Sometimes I'd like to give them a taste of their own medicine. Find out what they do for a living.."So, you work at a book store eh? So when you posted how you liked that new Star Wars game you were really just trying to suck us into your lame book store to buys some crummy Star Wars books! Can't you give it a rest! Everyone knows that fan fiction is better anyway and it's free! Die capitalist pig!"

Few times is this trend brought into relief more than what I saw today.  On a website discussing whether it's "legal" to create and use msstyles (an unsupported Microsoft skin format) I wrote:

MSStyles aren't illegal IMO.

However, they ARE derivatives of Luna.msstyles which is a copyrighted file.

So if I took, for instance, the Windows XP kernal, changed some bits and re-distributed it, is that legal? I'm not sure. That's how a lot of boot screens ARE distributed btw.

But the whole premise of this topic I think is problematic - is it illegal? Who's to say. Microsoft has had 3 years to weigh in. We do know they don't approve of msstyles being used by third parties but that's a far cry from them going after third parties who use them or create software that use them.

My personal opinion is that what you do on your own computer is your business.

Amazingly, someone read this and responded with the following (and bear in mind that this is on the same page as my response):

Frogboy... ,you shouldn't try to take an underground comunity like this as professional as you wanted, if everything was right, and about legal stuff like some foreigners see the US when a kid sues for a mosquito that was copyrighted and bit an apple in his backyard, maybe you wouldnt even have born.

When stuff like this happens on Capitalism Societies, it makes me wonder why doesnt the "Benefit for yourself without hurting" and the "Bigger Animal Dominates" societies persisted

And it so lame how even FROGBOY ported a inspirat skin that was an "illegal file" at first to windowblinds, and submitted by himself to a monopolized website full of old people ;[

And I dont hate frogboy itself, I hate the way he thinks about stuff sometimes to "conquer" the world

So apparently, when I say that I don't think msstyles are illegal what I'm really saying that they ARE illegal and that you should go out and buy WindowBlinds right now. And when I say what people do on their own computers is their own business what I really mean is that I want to control what you do on your computer as part of my latest Pinky & the Brain style world conquest strategy.

And sadly, this happens regularly.  As soon as someone figures out that I write software for a living, it's almost inevitable that everything I say will get warped by someone into some 2D characterture of what they imagine some evil capitalist is saying.  My words end up being like adult-speak on a Charlie Brown cartoon and replaced with lots of evil laughter and hand rubbing.

I guess I should be thankful that I didn't put a Donate to Tsunami victims post up somewhere lest someone accuse me of wanting to harvest the organs of Tsunami victims or something!