GNOME Ignoring its Own Users? 735
Jonathan writes "Some editorials were posted on the web the last few days about GNOME and its apparent lack of interest on user feedback, especially when GNOME pitches itself to follow a 'users first philosophy' in their press releases. OSNews started with an editorial about market research or lack thereof, Expert-Zone posted another one on how OSS must learn to take responsibility on its great success."
Don't feed the troll (Score:4, Insightful)
Lets not feed the trolls, ok? The only time I see OSNews is when it gets a mention on
Fork Gnome! (Score:2, Insightful)
I mean, isn't that one of the selling points of OSS?
If Gnome wants to be that "closed" to its users, the users are free to fork the build, switch to KDE or build their own from scratch.
(Granted it's not very PRACTICAL, but what are you going to do? Sue them for breach of contract? It's FREE!!!!)
Heh (Score:5, Insightful)
This is on the mark (Score:4, Insightful)
Real, for-profit development succeeds mostly by doing something the customer wants. That's the real-world bar that's been set by "the rest of the user community". By failing to listen to and develop to their requests, OSS risks becoming perceived as elitist, which will hamper wide-spread adoption.
Re:Fork Gnome! (Score:4, Insightful)
hmm (Score:2, Insightful)
If only this was K5... (Score:5, Insightful)
mnb Re:This has been happening for a while (Score:3, Insightful)
-1 flamebait
-0 true enough
+1 funny
Uh, what exactly has the project fixed? What exactly has the project released?
Use Eclipse as a Model (Score:4, Insightful)
The Eclipse [eclipse.org] project actively encourages its users and clients to log bugs and change requests as well as vote and comment on them through their Bugzilla. [eclipse.org]
IIRC, this concept was encouraged by ERS in Cathedral... It would be nice to see other mainstream OSS projects such as GNOME actively embrace this model of community involvement.
That being said, I think GNOME has done some wonderful things in the past, and as far as I'm concerned the desktop improves with every release, keep up the good work!
Developers developing for themselves (Score:2, Insightful)
Now we're getting more people who just want clones of Windows and Windows applications and want those tools to be free.
Open source is not just about developing free stuff. Its its own self-fullfilling serving product life cycle where not only you but someone else can keep adding onto the product and its open for anyone to modify.
Open source does not mean things have to be FREE in the monetary sense. Not even in the FREE FREE sense if its developed with some other open license than the GPL.
Its also the choice of open source developers on whether they want to be business oriented always taking feedback from users or just doing what they want. However if you don't pay for it, you really have no right to complain about when Developer X doesn't do something.
Re:Fork Gnome! (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're in the "OSS will rule the world" crowd, you need to understand that in order to succeed, you will need to adapt to what users want, not the other way around.
Call me an idiot... (Score:5, Insightful)
"A feature will be implemented if and only if there is a developer who wants to implement it"
Why should someone be compelled to develop software he doesn't want to develop? When you're forced to do something you don't want to do, that's called work, not a hobby. That isn't what open source is about.
If you want a feature put in an open source product, either do it yourself, wait for someone to do it, or pay someone to do it for you. But never ever ever expect someone to do it for you for free.
Case in point: Spatial Nautilus (Score:5, Insightful)
A case in point was the whole debacle over what was hailed as a great, new achievement in usability for Nautilus: the spatial metaphor.
What a disaster. It was amazing to me that it took a whole month or two of users complaining and bitching left and right, before the developers decided to add the ability to easily disable spatial mode. Agreed, they finally added it, but it was like pulling teeth. The "we developers know better than the users" attitude was very stricking.
I don't care whether you prefer spatial or not, the merits of spatial are a separate argument. But so many people complained about it, so vehemently, that it's amazing it took more than say a few days before they patched a simple menu accessible toggle. Today you will still get people saying stupid things like "well you could always disable it in gconf". Sigh.
Before the flames begin... (Score:3, Insightful)
What is an open-source developer's responsibility to his users?
I mean, sure, there are instances where someone might through together a little tool for himself, and open-source it just in case someone else might have a use, in which case I'd say his responsibility is practically zero.
However, the matter seems different to me when you have these relatively large foundations running major projects that are used in a large percentage of available distributions. Imagine FOSS does take over the world someday, and the Linux/Gnome combination accounts for a large percentage of the desktop market-share, what then? Let's pretend 90% of desktop users are dependent on Gnome to get things done-- do we still say that Gnome developers have no responsibility to address the needs of Gnome users?
If the Gnome development community would say yes, I'd probably hope that someone fork the project ASAP, someone who is willing to take responsibility for being user-centric. That goes for any major project. As a bit of an open-source advocate, I hope developers of major projects are always keeping their users in mind. If not, I'll have to go back to advocating closed-source proprietary companies insofar as they recognize "users" to be an important part of the equation, and not just "that annoying whining sound".
Inexcusable (Score:3, Insightful)
Let us thank, not criticize, Gnome Developers (Score:5, Insightful)
The Gnome developers have slaved away for years to GIVE us a really nice desktop environment.
Yet, some people have decided that isn't good enough, and want the Gnome developers to become personal servants to fulfill their whims and fancies.
We should be thanking the Gnome developers, not whining that they don't cater to our personal brain-fart of the day. An easy alternative for them is to not provide Gnome at all.
So stop whining and STFU.
Oh, ya, I am not a software developer of any kind. But if I gave away some sort of widget I made, and people whined that this free widget should be pink not purple, I would tell them to FO.
Re:This is on the mark (Score:5, Insightful)
And so Gnome, being the combined effort of real, for-profit companies like Novell, Sun, IBM, Red Hat and many others is... I'm sorry, what was your point there again?
"By failing to listen to and develop to their requests"
No, you see that's just the problem. Tools and systems like Gnome (which is a far-reaching set of specs, libraries and applications, which few of its users appreciate the value of, nor take advantage of beyond creating cute menus), are desgined for the needs of a huge and diverse community of users and user needs. Gnome satisfies the needs of its users....
AND THAT IS WHAT THE SLASHDOT CROWD HATES. We, here at Slashdot, are a microcosm of developers and geeks of various flavors. We have specialized needs, and we hate seeing out tools "watered down" by the needs of the average user.
That's fair, and I'm not saying that we should not push for our needs too, but face it: Gnome and KDE have both reached a level of popularity where your average Slashdotter is no longer the primary target-user. Cope.
free market & self-centred twits (Score:1, Insightful)
And open source is different how?
I've noticed a half frightening and half amusing tendency of people to consider the failure to satisfy their personal twitches as some world-ending event. These people typically whine that *they* will not use the product because it is not exactly what *they* want as if their boycott will bring all injustice crumbling down.
Get some perspective on your relative meaninglessness on this planet. Choose what works for you and offer suggestions on improvement with more thought than just *gimme gimme* or use something else.
Insightful? (Score:1, Insightful)
This isn't about condeming Gnome or about forking Gnome, this is about discussing how to improve Gnome.
Re:For those just joining the discussion (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Don't feed the troll (Score:3, Insightful)
If she had a clue and wanted to do something useful she would quit her bitching and DO something. If she doesn't think the GNOME devels are going in the right direction and end user needs aren't being met, then DO something, talk is cheap in the Open Source world, show us a willingness to get your hands dirty and people will want to talk.
Devels aren't generally focus group types, they aren't normally 'people' people. So why doesn't she do what she claims to be good at and talk to these unwashed masses of end users she claims to speak for, find out specifically what they are crying out for and make concrete feature requests backed up by these user's problems? Because that would be hard WORK and wouldn't generate nearly as many pageviews on her website, which is what her job really is; stirring the pot and generating lots of traffic. Think Dvorak without the star power that comes from trolling for ZD for decades.
Re:Call me an idiot... (Score:3, Insightful)
Way to talk all the CIOs/CFOs around the world out of using FOSS for anything ever.
Not really a problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
Looking at the progress Gnome has made in the last few versions, its hard for me to even see where this is coming from. Yes, we're still missing a menu editor, and yes, that is a problem. Overall, though, each recent version of Gnome has been an improvement over the past, and the useability is only getting better.
If you look at the event that started this whole article, it was essentially Eugenia extrapolating "We'll do that if there's a developer who wants to" into "We don't care about what our users want". Hardly what I'd consider a logical step.
I read OS News daily because it provides a good roundup of news I like - much like Slashdot - but in the past few months, I've come to dread any article with Eugenia's name on it (much like many here dreaded Michael's name popping up). If things anywhere don't work like she expects them to, it's suddenly a huge overwhelming problem with Open Source in general - and usually, they aren't even problems at all - just spats where the developers of whatever she was using didn't agree with her suggestion/request.
I was a KDE user when I started using linux as my desktop three-four years ago, and it's still a good desktop. Nothing wrong with KDE, and I don't want to take this in that direction. But I switched to Gnome with 2.6 - it just felt better to me, and 2.8, 2.10 are continuing to improve. At least for this user, Gnome is doing exactly what I want it to.
Comment removed (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Fork Gnome! (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree that developers of general purpose software should listen to user feedback and combine that with usability testing and time-tested principles of UI design, but that's a no-brainer. Frankly if there's problems in this area, it goes much deeper than not listening to a few feature requests.
This situation just looks like open source groupies demanding that they get everything they want for free. Well I have news for people with this attitude: contributors to open source are still doing a public service even if they aren't your personal code-whore. If you want a feature in an open source product you have two guaranteed options of getting the feature: learn how to do it yourself or pay someone to do it. That's exactly two more options than you get with proprietary software where all you can do is request a feature and hope for the best.
Re:Don't feed the troll (Score:5, Insightful)
There is more to creating applications than filling in code but your attitude does explain why things are the way they are Eg. "If you want it, write it, if you won't write it, STFU"
Well, not so much an idiot (Score:5, Insightful)
First, open source developers are increasingly describing their projects as user-oriented, enterprise-ready, etc. Now, I have nothing against hobby development in which users are not a concern because it's purely for enjoyment. Heck, given the choice I'd ignore users' requests and just work on projects of interest to me in my job if I could. But if you're going to do that, be honest about it. Don't describe your software as user-oriented, because it's not. Make it explicit that it's a hobby project, and you have no real interest in the desires of your user base.
Second, while ignoring users may be a lot more pleasant than listening to their concerns and addressing them, it's *very* ultimately bad engineering practice (then again, job titles aside most software developers are NOT engineers!), and reinforces a selfishness and arrogance that can bleed over into one's professional work. I've seen this happen in others, I've seen it happen in myself a few times. If you're going to open your project up to the world, you're limiting your own experience and opportunities by maintaining it as a navel-gazing exercise.
Finally, considering user requests can move development in an unexpected direction. Sometimes it's the wrong direction, and I think it's OK to answer a request with "that's a bad idea, and here's why". But sometimes after going in that direction, adding some features, maybe refactoring a bit, you look back and say "why didn't I think of that?" Any community of developers develops blind spots and biases, and sometimes these can be substantial enough for outside input to benefit everyone.
Now, of the above I think the first reason is the most compelling. You're under no obligation to do anything to improve your project or your skills or wisdom as a developer. However, I think you *are* obligated to describe your project honestly.
Re:Fork Gnome! (Score:3, Insightful)
> Gnome needs to cater to users who don't know the first thing about what's under the hood.
Gnome doesn't have to do anything. If users don't like Gnome they can use something else.
If they want features they can try to convince the developers that the requested feature is desireable, implement it themselves or at least make it easier for the developers to understand what they want and how they want it by creating a functional spec.
> It needs to just work.
Well, for me, it does.
You're not "customers" (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the "dark underbelly" of OSS. The creators of Gnome didn't necessarily do it for money. They did it for love of implementing their vision and you're along for the ride.
It's a "good idea"(tm) to listen to your fans and adjust designs accordingly. You have to do this if this is your bread and butter for making your livelihood. (IE when you're getting paid for this) But if you feel strongly in your vision over fans complaints than that's your prerogative. As a fan, your choice is to switch to something else or change a fork to the way you like it or pay somebody to do it for you. The code is completely and utterly open for you to do this. (That's the bright side of OSS)
If Gnome pisses off enough people that they stop using Gnome then something better may come along. But they're not bound to community responsibility.
Re:Fork Gnome! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not really a problem. (Score:1, Insightful)
I've been pleased with the progress of Gnome through 2.4, 2.6 and 2.8 and I'm waiting patiently for 2.10 to make it into Debian experimental. I like spatial nautilus. No one forced me to upgrade. I chose it each time.
Thank-you, devs.
As for OSNews, it's probably best to avoid any of their "exclusive" content. Just as the modern popular press mistakes a sneer for journalism, the web press mistakes a whine for news.
Re:Let us thank, not criticize, Gnome Developers (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet, some people have decided that isn't good enough, and want the Gnome developers to become personal servants to fulfill their whims and fancies.
Yeah, that reasoning might have worked if their front page had been a disclaimer like: This is just my hobby. Don't rely on it.
However, the Gnome foundation has partnered up with other OSS products and developers, and the developers have been pushing to be taken seriously as a real DE fit for general use. They've encouraged other developers to use their DE as a platform, and generally acted as though they they don't intend their project to be some hobby software for their own use, but that they want people to use it. They've even marketed themselves as being the most user-friendly and user-centric DE for unix-like systems.
So, OSS foundations, don't promote your project that way unless you want users to expect you to pay attention to them. Developers, don't participate in projects of that sort if you can't handle users wanting the project to be useful. In the most general terms I can think of, don't publish your work on the internet if you can't handle criticism.
I mean, what if, in response to the impending flames this post will receive, I wrote, "I just wrote this for free! How dare you publicly disagree when I spent my own free time slaving away typing up clever little articles of writing, and GAVE them to you!" Wouldn't that be a little silly? I mean, I posted it for you to read of my own free will, in a forum that allows for responses. What should I expect?
What Gets Developed (Score:3, Insightful)
- Motivation - without this (or a contract binding you) the work inevitably languishes
- Ability - An idea may be great but if it's not already something I can do or think I can learn to do, it's not feasible for me to do it.
- Resources - Other things (health, family, paying jobs) have higher priority. Is it realistic of me to volunteer for this?
I frequently hear from users who want something but have no idea how it would be implemented. They throw out the idea (e.g. "a voice driven paint program!") and instantly expect the same fervor that struck them will strike me.What's worse is when they don't take "No" as an acceptable answer. There are so many times I've seen people be bullied in to saying "Yes" and then only get a half-implemented, half-assed, crappy result. Thus disappointing everyone involved, hurting their own reputation, and discouraging other developers who want to work on the same idea if they have to follow in your failed precedent.
I like development ideas. I really hate it when I have developed a new skill or mastered a new api and I have zero idea about how I could usefully work with it. But for working on someone else's idea, the motivation, ability, and resources have to be there or I'm just going to end up screwing yet another pooch. (so to speak)
Re:Don't feed the troll (Score:5, Insightful)
Feel free to correct me if I totally missed the point on this though.
-nB
Re:Don't feed the troll (Score:3, Insightful)
Talk about an inability to read.....
I said she should quit her vague bitching and DO something. Given that the typical devel is lacking in 'people' skills, whining that THEY aren't running polls and focus groups to discover what the mythical 'typical clueless end user' wants is pointless. She, on the other hand, claims to undertand these people so if she wants things to improve she should get off her butt and act as an interface between the end users and devels. Talk to these users, learn what they actually suffer from a lack of and make specific feature requests. But even then she shouldn't get too offended when an idea gets shot down. Not being a devel she has no way of really knowing when a suggestion would be a major PITA or not.
Those who aren't willing to CONTRIBUTE to an Open Source/Free Software project are not entitled to an opinion. But those who do not write code can still contribute. They can test and report bugs, write documentation, maintain infrastructure, help work the mailing lists and answer the easy questions to free up the devels time, contribute storage & bandwidth, cash, etc. Bitching without a willingness to enter the trenches first isn't a positive contribution, but it does appear to generate pageviews.
Re:Don't feed the troll (Score:2, Insightful)
Let me ask this. Instead of writing that GNOME ignores its users, why not instead hustle up some developers to implement the feature she wanted. A feature was ask for and someone at Gnome said if we can find a developer to implement it, it'll be done. Well, Eugenia has the perfect forum for finding people and maybe she could find some developers to implement it. How about that for contributing.
Re:Fork Gnome! (Score:4, Insightful)
Companies can (and, believe it or not, do) offer open source code, too. Show up with a check, watch your feature get implemented. Even better, you're not fucked if a vendor isn't cooperative.
You want a feature added to a Microsoft product? Go see Microsoft with a checkbook. If they don't want to do it, or they want too much money, you can either suck it up or pay someone to reimplement whatever piece of software you need (with the feature you want) from scratch.
You want a feature added to GNOME or any other open source product? Take that same checkbook and go see Red Hat. If they're unresponsive, go see SuSE, Mandrake, or one of the lead developers for the product in question. In fact, take bids on the feature you want from all interested parties and get an even lower price. No matter who does it they won't have to reinvent the wheel. If all else fails, and everyone in the world decides they don't like money anymore, you can still implement the feature yourself without having to start from scratch.
Why can't you see how much more intelligent this is? You're not a middle manager, are you?
Mod me down for honesty: (Score:1, Insightful)
Be honest - does anyone reading this think Havoc is *not* a sociopath?
Re:Heh (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Don't feed the troll (Score:2, Insightful)
That is the open source way. The way it works is simple. If enough people want something done, they have the freedom to do it. If you can't reach that critical mass of people interested in exercising that freedom to DO SOMETHING to get it done, then it must not be worth doing.
Look at it this way.
1. The code is open. Anybody can do whatever they want with it.
2. There are programmers out there with way more skills than money. Somebody out there can use a job or a project to work on.
3. If there are enough people who really want to see something done in a project, they can pool their money and pay somebody to do it.
And if you can't get enough people together to pay SOMEBODY in this whole world to do it, it must not be worth doing.
Open source is about community. The community is the key in every aspect of it. Creating it, using it, improving it, supporting it, all of it. Open source is also a meritocracy. Nobody owes you, and nobody owes the community, anything.
So yeah, she's entitled to an opinion, but if she's not willing to DO something about it, other than be mad that someone else won't do something about it, then she should STFU.
Re:Don't feed the troll (Score:1, Insightful)
Hellbent on cloning the look of windows???? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Call me an idiot... (Score:2, Insightful)
Why should someone be compelled to develop software he doesn't want to develop? When you're forced to do something you don't want to do, that's called work, not a hobby. That isn't what open source is about.
If you want a feature put in an open source product, either do it yourself, wait for someone to do it, or pay someone to do it for you. But never ever ever expect someone to do it for you for free.
This is why I bought my operating system...
Re:Don't feed the troll (Score:4, Insightful)
She seems to think a web-poll would be a helpful way of doing market research for GNOME, and they don't. I tend to believe them. Even though they're the spatial browser idiots, I'll take their opinion over Eugenia's.
A more accurate title would be... (Score:5, Insightful)
The author of that OSNews article is trying to push her own agenda. She seems to think that GNOME should be doing focus group research, and has fairly specific ideas of how that should be done. When some of the GNOME devs pointed out that her ideas weren't workable in their opinions, she took it personally and kept trying to push her ideas -- without making any significant effort to refute the devs' points, I might add. Finally, people got so fed up with this discussion (which is pretty off-topic for the mailing list where it took place to start with) that they told her to take it elsewhere.
Underlying it all is a sense of entitlement, a feeling that her ideas are so good and so important that the GNOME devs should implement them without further discussion. Since she's neither a paying customer nor able/willing to develop the features she wants herself, the GNOME devs chose to ignore her... and rightly so, in my book.
Re:Don't feed the troll (Score:4, Insightful)
I was not happy from the answer I got from the Gnome developers: "A feature will be implemented if and only if there is a developer who wants to implement it."
And then she goes on to rant how Open Source developers need to cater to their users if open source is to 'succeed.' So, apparently Eugenia doesn't really understand how Open Source software development works. It's not a Leia^H^H^H^Hcommittee. All work is voluntary, which means, as the Gnome devel team pointed out, the only work that gets done is work the devel team feels like working on.
The Freedom OSS provides is the freedom to add features you want either by writing them yourself or paying others to do it. You're also free to whine to the devel team about the features you want... and they're free to ignore you. Freedom is like that.
Re:Fork Gnome! (Score:3, Insightful)
I have this feeling that the "OSS will rule the world" crowd are not the ones actually developing the software. In fact, I am not sure where they came from...
Re:Don't feed the troll (Score:5, Insightful)
users of osnews.com have been requesting minor and major improvements in the site's comment system and it has fallen on deaf ears. she actually goes out of her way to moderate down any such requests sometimes and gets pissy if you point out her own hypocrisy(sp?) hiding behind the mantra of osnews being a free service blah blah blah.
Re:Well, not so much an idiot (Score:4, Insightful)
Finally, considering user requests can move development in an unexpected direction. Sometimes it's the wrong direction, and I think it's OK to answer a request with "that's a bad idea, and here's why". But sometimes after going in that direction, adding some features, maybe refactoring a bit, you look back and say "why didn't I think of that?" Any community of developers develops blind spots and biases, and sometimes these can be substantial enough for outside input to benefit everyone.
I think both of these point (my reading of them is that they're similar) indicate what I view to be the most unfortunate aspect of when developers decide that they don't care what their users think: it often makes for a worse product.
Now, I'm not someone who believes in the "inherent intelligence of everyday people". I think people can be really stupid. However, the way in which they're stupid usually is that they're bad about understanding their problems and finding solutions to their problems, but they're usually pretty good at knowing that they have a problem.
As an example, think of when a person goes to the doctor/ER because they think something is wrong. Now, of course, there are hypochondriacs who go to the doctor all the time over stupid things, but mostly, when someone goes to the doctor because they believe something is wrong, for the most part, something *is* wrong. I might go in because I have a terrible sore throat. I might insist to the doctor that I have strep. It might turn out that I have throat cancer. I might insist that I need antibiotics, and he might insist that I need radiation.
Similarly, in software development, if a whole lot of users are complaining, there probably *is* a problem. They might not really understand the problem, and their proposed solutions might be wrong, but if you're getting loads of similar complaints, there is a problem somewhere. Why? Because software is all about the users. When software isn't being used by users, it's just a series of bits.
Maybe it's just a perception problem (users aren't understanding things), but a perception problem *is* a problem. Maybe you just need better documentation or need to explain something better. Maybe it's something tiny, like you label a button differently and people understand what's going on at that point. Maybe something is designed badly.
Beyond fixing problems, anyone trying to solve problems should be really open to input, because you never know what will give you some amazing inspiration. Contrary to popular belief, great thinkers don't come up with great ideas in a vacuum.
I guess my point is, the only way to know is to listen to the users. Either way, I think developers (all developers) should remember two things:
She already contributed (Score:3, Insightful)
It's up to the devs if they want to pay attention to it or not.
Re:Don't feed the troll (Score:4, Insightful)
Or they can write a piece that brings the issue out, so other people get aware of the problem.
Bitching without a willingness to enter the trenches first isn't a positive contribution
I think it is, if it's bitching in a way that spurs discussion. Unfortunately, so far it's mostly been a meta discussion here on slashot.
Re:Don't feed the troll (Score:4, Insightful)
Uh, apparently she does, or else she wouldn't be complaining about it.
Essentially, what you're saying is it's okay if user requests get ignored becuase "that's how OSS works." Well, then don't bitch when someone writes up an article complaining that their requests aren't heard!
Developers want to appear as putting out products that focus on usability, but don't want to deal with the users who are working with their products. Sorry, if you don't want to hear any complaints about your product, keep it on your private network and never release it. Just because it's a volunteer effort doesn't mean squat. Everything is a volunteer effort--it's just that in the commercial world, you also get paid for your work so there's more incentive to stay working.
Re:Don't feed the troll (Score:1, Insightful)
But isn't giving your honest opinion a CONTRIBUTION to the Open Source/Free Software project?
After all, if you're using it, you're contributing to the success of the project. What good is software that is never used?
TRANSLATION (Score:3, Insightful)
Assholes, indeed.
Re:Don't feed the troll (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Don't feed the troll (Score:1, Insightful)
So yes, she tried to do something. She wanted to change how everything worked and make her way have precedence over everyone else and then whined online when she didn't get her way, portraying things as "Gnome developers don't listen" instead of the truth as "Gnome developers don't do exactly what I want."
If she had gone off and done a poll on OSNews, that would have been great. Personally, I would have read it and incorporated the feedback. But she wasn't willing to help unless it was done exactly her way and that's why people ended up telling her off in the end. She can do great work and be a great help (I personally think gnomefiles rocks, for example), but she seems to be misguided at times...
Elijah
Re:Don't feed the troll (Score:4, Insightful)
If you offered me enough money, I'd want to do it. Even if I didn't need it personally. But then, once you'd paid me for it, it would be yours (and everyone elses) forever, not just until I've forced the version you paid me for into obsolescence.
I refuse to use that software, because I respect myself and my choices. I prefer to shed down the right money for the right commercial software (open or closed), than to use half-baked, half-implemented OSS software made by deaf developers.
Rather than throwing a temper tantrum like a 4 year old and buying commercial software just to spite those arrogant bastards that keep giving away what they want to give away instead of what she wants them to give away, perhaps she could show some inititive and set up a system where people could contribute to a "bounty" for features. I'd chuck $5 from my paypal account into a fund for features I want as long as I could pull my money back if they took too long. This woman has a website, she accepts paypal subscriptions, something like this should not be beyond her abilities.
But instead of doing something that will solve the problem, she just wants to bitch. Wow, they weren't interested in surrendering control of what they do in their free time to her and her little voting site. The temerity of the bastards not to jump on her generous offer.
Re:Don't feed the troll (Score:5, Insightful)
I accept that 'user-oriented' suggests some level of dedication towards the desires of their user base, but this doesn't mean they'll open up the direction of the project to a web poll of features. In OSS it's the wheel that the engineers feel like working on that gets the grease.
Perhaps one of them could have said "Fine, you implement THIS, Eugenia."
Certainly they could have said it, but why? The key here is that OSS projects don't move in any direction without someone pushing. The crowds chanting and jeering along for the ride only have as much effect as the programmers want. And we could argue that they should spend more time listening to the crowd... but why? It's their time, and they're free to do with it as they wish.
Re:Well, not so much an idiot (Score:3, Insightful)
The difference is in the definition. To me "user centric" means that the project or institution wishes to target its efforts at the most common demographic of users. I personally think Gnome is honest when it says it is user centric- I use Gnome everyday because (don't laugh at me) I like how the options menu and feature list don't runnith over with tons of things most computer users don't use. To me, the opposite of a user centric project would be "minority centric" and would have more options and features only users at the far ends of the bell curse ever touch at the expense of most of the users. Gnome's best features are features that aren't "officially" part of Gnome but every Gnome distro includes. The ability to be extended easily (by users) is what allows Gnome's strategy- targeting only the largest demographic of computer users- to work and succeed. They would only be liars to me if they began to complicate their desktop and add in tons of features just because a few loud users want it.
Re:Use Eclipse as a Model (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps you didn't read Eugenia's original post to desktop-devel-list [gnome.org]... no shame in that. She neglected to link to it in her own article, which suggests at least a modicum of shame (though not enough to stop her from posting the article). It says, and I quote:
I currently have 20 feature requests for Gnome 2.1. Where should I place them? The Bugzilla is not where I want to place them because:
a. no one will pay attention ultimately (gazillion of feature requests never go anywhere there, let along bug reports)
b. I don't want to spend half an hour placing 20 features requests on the bugzilla one by one.
Her first point is bogus... I'm with many other volunteers in traiging GNOME Bugzilla regularly, and have worked on many enhancements myself.
Her second point... She is too lazy to file enhancements at bugzilla. However, she's got plenty of energy to send e-mail using Microsoft Outlook to a GNOME developer's mailing list, then write the article at OSNews.
Yes, GNOME encourages people to file enhancements at Bugzilla. Eugenia, however, rejects this, then says GNOME Developers doesn't listen to users.
Re:For those just joining the discussion (Score:3, Insightful)
Open Source is no different from proprietary software. In the long run the features that people pay money to implement get implemented. Eugenia is just upset because the Gnome folks aren't particularly interested in courting existing Gnome users. Gnome doesn't want Eugenia's input, it wants your CIO's input, and then after that it wants your grandmother's input.
Gnome already went down the path of listening to hackers, and they ended up with a ridiculously configurable desktop with a Window manager (sawfish) that was scriptable in lisp. Now, I don't have anything against lisp. Heck, I spend the better part of my day in Emacs. The problem is that hackers want an entirely different kind of system than normal users (Emacs is an excellent example of this). As Gnome simplifies its desktop folks like Eugenia get all upset. They liked the Gnome with a hojillion options, and they wish they could force the project back in that direction (without writing code, of course).
End user input is pouring into Gnome at a fantastic pace. It just isn't coming in from bugzilla, or from the mailing lists, or some other "hacker" interface, but rather it is coming in from the marketing departments at Red Hat, Novell, and Sun. Those guys are talking to actual customers and finding out ways to sell them Free Software. Then they march back to their respective companies and they give the hackers their marching orders.
Do I miss some of the cool Gnome features that have been removed or hidden? Yeah, I do. I miss the easy access to readline completion in file open dialogs, I don't like having to hit "SHIFT" to turn snap to Window on, and piles of other little niggles. However, I would rather have Gnome listen to normal customers and succeed than listen exclusively to hackers and fail. Push comes to shove I will always have Emacs...
There's no question that Gnome 2 is easier for my wife to use, and that's what really matters.
Re:The grand secret of spatial nautilus (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean... seriously. Why would I use Gnome when it's just a bad imitation of Windows and OSX? The one thing I really, really loved was the tab completion in the file dialogs, but then they decided to remove it. Fine, don't have it as the default, but at least give me the choice to fscking enable it!
I haven't felt much Gnome Love since 1.4.
As for Windows XP... It feels like sleeping with the enemy and I really *hate* not having Linux underneath. But when I'm not allowed to have any tab completion no matter what (and don't give me that "You can just press CTRL-L crap), I might as well use the best desktop OS out there.
So what should they do?
Combine the flexibilty of KDE with the looks of Gnome. We need a desktop that's both good looking and has functionality for power users (as well as regular users). The easy fix: Jimmac should switch to KDE
Re:Obligatory comment (Score:1, Insightful)
GNOME sucks, KDE sucks, Windows sucks, OS X sucks.
I don't think a decent desktop evironment exists. Just like there is no decent OS, no decent programming language.
Meh, I've used just about everything that exists (including mainframe stuff and everything in between) we're all using crap. And I mean that seriously.
Re:Well, not so much an idiot (Score:5, Insightful)
The Gnome hackers are listening to their customers, they just aren't listening to Eugenia. Instead they are listening to the marketing departments at places like Red Hat, Novell, or Sun. The marketing departments talk to customers and find out what it would take to sell Gnome desktops. Then the developers are then given marching orders.
Once upon a time the Gnome developers were given free reign to design whatever the heck that they wanted and they designed a hyper-configurable desktop scriptable in a variant of Lisp. Now the Gnome developers are listening to actual customers, and the bottom line is that they are ripping out as much configuration as possible. This loss of functionality makes some former Gnome users (like Eugenia) upset, but that's what happens when you try and design software that is approachable by normal folks.
The thing to remember is that the Gnome folks aren't targetting the kind of people that write to development mailing lists or know anything about bugzilla, and that's a good thing. The less the Gnome hackers listen to Eugenia the more likely they are to create something that is useable by my grandma.
Re:Don't feed the troll (Score:4, Insightful)
They heard her request, and the declined it. It was heard, it was just rejected.
Re:Don't feed the troll (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Don't feed the troll (Score:3, Insightful)
Assuming you're not as dense as this statement makes you appear, here's what's wrong with this particular bit:
They can test and report bugs
Technically, this is what she did - report a bug in the feedback system (effect of feature requests, voting and so on) Unless you want to uphold the idea that user feedback is irrelevant to F/OSS or that for some reason "user feedback" changes meaning when applied to F/OSS, in which case I apologize for attempting to argue with you.
What is Design? Who decides? (Score:2, Insightful)
The article by the editor of ZDnet has intelligent things to say about design process, mainly that devs should be designing for their users, and not themselves. This in and of itself is an absolutely true statement. Where the trouble comes in is that software development does not really follow the standard model of design. It *can't*. When I design something for my users, ideally I would be as detached as possible from this user group, and then do research to find out what they want. I would observe them, interview them, take pictures, and use all sorts of techniques to build a picture of how the interaction works. Then I would build and synthesize, etc etc etc.
This model is *inherently* flawed for most software developers. It's like asking someone who spends all day in a tractor to redesign his tractor, while driving it. Yes, the tractor driver knows a heck of a lot about tractor driving. The main purpose of focusing on your user group, instead of designing for yourself, is to design truly innovative things, and not just generalize your user group to death.
So, to ask these tractor drivers (the devs) to design for other people is like asking your tractor driving to forget the fact that he's been driving a tractor for 12 years, and knows it inside and out.
From a commercial product perspective, maybe this needs to happen. Maybe we need to find a whole bunch of designers who have never used a computer and ask them to study this user group, and then design an interface that is truly innovative. But, on the other hand, maybe having software that reflects what the hardware is like is inherently better. I don't know, I play both sides of this game. Either way, people should be more tolerant and respectful of both Eugenia's and the devs' perspectives on the issue, since they are both technically right.
It's a different problem (Score:3, Insightful)
The real problems are:
See the cartoon at the top of this page [theumlcafe.com]
GNOME got to a point where something had to be done to take it in a specific direction. The direction it took stands to benefit the most people in the most profound way. Personally I'm glad that they moved ahead the way they did. The KDE community is currently locked somewhat in stasis, because there are too many opinions, too much entropy, and no single consensus as to how to move forward. I'm not talking about making small changes, those are happening, and KDE is implementing some great features, I'm talking about the lack of major new directions for KDE such as what is happening in GNOME. That will change, a consensus will arise, and KDE will move forward in a major new direction at some point in the future.
Until then, try taking GNOME 1.0-GNOME 1.2 and extrapolate the situation that existed then to produce a hypothetical view of the way things would be now if a few core GNOME hackers hadn't done something. It would be a real mess of mismatching pieces. It might be a hacker-boy-cool mess, but it would be a mess. GNOME-2.10 is clean, lean, and most importantly consistent, and a better fit for how our subconscious processes understand information.
Besides, if they're the ones writing the code, I say they can do whatever they want with it.
Re:Don't feed the troll (Score:4, Insightful)
If you ignore the ranting, it comes down to this: do the developers really want to encourage forking which may wrench the entire project out of their control, so far as relevance is concerned? Really, she's giving them a chance to cut this off before it reaches that point. While the level of loyalty seen here for the core developers is encouraging, reacting to the tone of her message ignores the issue.
Just because someone is being an ass, doesn't mean they're wrong.
Talk about feeding the trolls... (Score:1, Insightful)
For crying out loud moderators, please do your homework before modding idiots and the uninsightful drivel that they post up. Sheesh!