Pidgin Controversy Triggers Fork

paleshadows writes "Pidgin, the premier multi-protocol instant messaging client, has been forked. This is the result of a heated, emotional, and very interesting debate over a controversial new feature: As of version 2.4, the ability to manually resize the text input area has been removed; instead, it automatically resizes depending on how much is typed. It turns out that this feature, along with the uncompromising unwillingness of the developers to provide an option to turn it off, annoys the bejesus of very many users. One comment made by a Professor that teaches "Collaboration in an Open Source World" argued that 'It's easy to see why open source developers could develop dogmas. [...] The most dangerous dogma is the one exhibited here: the God feature. "One technological solution can meet every possible user-desired variation of a feature." [...] You [the developers] are ignoring the fan base with a dedication to your convictions that is alarmingly evident to even the most unobservant of followers, and as such, you are demonstrating that you no longer deserve to be in the position of servicing the needs of your user base.'" Does anyone besides me find this utterly ridiculous?

GET OFF MY LAUN!

[Bananatree3]

This whole situation reeks of some crusty developer stuck in his ways.

Is there a technical reason not to allow both ways

[Paradigm_Complex]

If there's no technical reason not to allow both options with a simple option in a menu somewhere, then yes it is ridiculous. If there is some downside to allowing users to resize the text input area then a fork is exactly what is needed. Open source is awesome.

More options are always better!

[Reality Master 201]

More options are always better, right?

I mean, sure, forking a project means that we now have fewer developers concentrating on a product than before, but it's for the best because now we'll have two IM clients that are nearly identical except for some minor things. All because some programmers are egotistical assholes!

The Open Source world needs to grow the fuck up. More options aren't always better - more good options are better, more options for the sake of having more options or because you can't learn to play nicely with the other kids are stupid.

That's why Open-Source fails on the desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

I know some will probably tag this as a troll or a flamebait, however IMHO this is exactly why Linux will never be able to really replace either Windows or Mac OS X for desktop usage.

Too many people who think they know better than the end-users, and too much work being done by lots of people on different, competing projects. You need to unite your efforts, not work against each others. This fork is just another proof (and WTH is with that "premier multi-protocol instant messaging client" remark? Nobody uses that on Windows and Mac OS X).

The whole KDE vs Gnome debate is one of the things that keeps Windows on PCs.

Posted as AC because of Linux and OSS zealots.

All Too Often

[eldavojohn]

All too often on software projects, I see someone spend several days figuring out a neat thing to implement that they personally think is a great addition.

And when it comes time to remove it they defend it. They may even realize that they were wrong thinking everyone would love it. But they just don't want to give up that code that cost them so much time to figure out and write.

Coding for several days only to realize that you need to throw everything you wrote away is one of the hardest skills for a developer to learn ...

How to unfork:

[wbren]

Add the following in Preferences window:

[X] Allow resizing of chat input area

Find *what* utterly ridiculous?

[bigskank]

"Does anyone besides me find this utterly ridiculous?"

Depends on what you mean. Do I find it ridiculous that developers are ignoring a sizable portion of their userbase and implementing a feature that many people would like to disable? Yes, I find it ridiculous. Not terribly surprising, but ridiculous nonetheless.

Do I find it ridiculous that it's causing a project to fork? Not particularly. This is supposed to be the one of the greatest advantages of open source; if you don't like the way people play, you can pick up the pieces and start your own game. Silly me, I had secretly hoped that the threat of something like this happening would keep software like pidgin from ignoring its user base. Guess I was wrong.

This feature sounds Gnomish

[pembo13]

Seems like something that would be done to a Gnome app. Hope that's just a coincidence. Back to Kopete I guess.

Re:Good God

[somersault]

MS would might have just made it an option.. doesn't sound like it would have been difficult to do. This issue has been brought on by the users anyway, MS users don't have the option to fork off a new codebase, they just have to take it up the ass with whatever MS does (I'm thinking of Office here mainly, where you just don't have many viable alternatives because of the attitude of the world that Office is the only thing you can use to write letters or make presentations and spreadsheets)

Re:Is there a technical reason not to allow both w

[grumbel]

I think the main reason to not make it an option is because it is such a tiny obscure detail that you wouldn't even think to look for an option in the first place. And thus adding the option to the GUI would be useless clutter. Good usability is often about removing options and make things behave the right way at default.

Re:Good God

[Anonymous Coward]

Just staying AC
But, yeah it's no joke... I gave up on being a test engineer for software after being let go (along with some others) at M.S. because I a would not pass a product with a clearly significant usability flaw. The development said it was by design and a feature. (Very similiar to the resizing functions mentioned above.)

I went and did the numbers and a full quality project, VOC data, etc. I presented my case at a later build. The developer, not having any actual evidence but his opinion, went into a flame war, trying to take me down. Effectively, I was insulting is 'intellegence' and want to 'undo months of work'. When that failed, he called me racist. He won, I got let go. I found out he was let go a couple months later over trying to defend the same 'feature' after a presentation with some higher ups, and insulted someone above him.

These flame wars happen all to much, I've found many programmers have 'control issues', perhaps that's what makes them good programmers; but lousy decision makers.

Re:More options are always better!

[Rob T Firefly]

I'd take this fork as an extreme example of the Open Source world "growing the fuck up," as you put it. The original developers choose not to fulfill a need of their user base, so a new crowd with the wherewithal to do it decides to work on achieving that rather than exchanging flames with the old guard.

If the kid with the ball doesn't want to play fair, you either cry about it, or get your own ball and play like reasonable people. These folks did the latter.

Re:Good God

[_Sprocket_]

The difference with Open Source and other groups of talented, opinionated, and driven technical groups is that with OSS the "discussions" are held in mostly public forums.

Re:Good God

[SatanicPuppy]

Yes, and no.

The thing with this sort of program is that it'd be trivial to put a "choose your own color" option in the configuration, so everyone could make the bikeshed whatever goddamn color they wanted.

Instead, the dev team has hashed this whole thing out amongst themselves in a "bikeshed" style debate, and they've come up with this fricking solution which they had to sweat blood to get everyone to agree to, and then it turns out that users don't like it?

I can see why they're stuck on their solution, but I CANNOT understand why they don't understand that extra UI options are critical to a good app. Forcing users to deal with a UI that cannot be configured at all is not the way it goes in todays programming.

Re:Wow

[Skye16]

Well, in all honesty I don't think it's over the text area so much as the fact that those in charge are adamant about allowing anyone to configure the client as they see fit. This is just a small symptom; the underlying cause is unbridled arrogance and muleheaded stubbornness.

Re:Is there a technical reason not to allow both w

[_Swank]

While I completely agree with your premise - that usability is often the opposite of allowing configurable options for everything - I think that the way they made the dialog behave is not the right way. I have never seen another application do what pidgin now does. In general, that doesn't necessarily make it the wrong thing to do but in this case I think it does.

Implement it as a plugin!

[jwkfs]

I mean, pidgin supports plugins. Is there a reason this can't be implemented as a 'let me resize the input box' plugin?

Re:Is there a technical reason not to allow both w

[FatMacDaddy]

I agree that simplicity is almost always better, but I would say that good usability is always about listening to user feedback. Basically this change flunked the usability test for a lot of folks and the developers should find a way to elegantly implement that option. There's undoubtedly a way to add this ability without adding "useless clutter." And I would say this clutter wouldn't be useless since people are asking for it.

Re:Good God

[iamacat]

You are absolutely right if the project only ever has to support a single UI option. However, products that expect to be around for a few years accumulate dozens of such options. At this point, nobody has the bandwidth to test every possible configuration or fix bugs that only affect a few users who chose a particular combination. The code which is not used in default configuration is likely to not work properly with new core code, not be ported to additional platforms and plain look ugly with main UI which is skinned for a particular layout. Users who try the product on someone else's machine walk away with a negative impression as it has been customized to something that most people find unusable.

On the other hand, if you fix the UI, lots of users will complain initially. A majority of those will quickly adjust and stop noticing the difference. Some will walk away or fork the project. However, for those that stick around are much more likely to find that the UI functions properly in the manner intended than if the attention of developers was spread among thousands of possible configurations.

It's a basic choice for a project developer to do one thing well or provide many options where some or all do not work quite as well.

Re:GET OFF MY LAUN!

[jd142]

But if the software isn't written for the users, what is it written for? If it is just written purely for the author's use, then don't bother creating a community. By creating a community with feedback and interaction with the user base, the project is no longer "write a gaim replacement" it has morphed into "create a piece of software for my community." If you don't care about what the users think, don't release the software and build up pidgin.im with its forums and a promise of support and development.

I welcome the fork!!

[DarkMorph]

This has been well overdue in my honest opinion! From every minor release to release we have been seeing subtle UI changes that offer absolutely no choice. The preferences dialog hardly ever changes while other things are changing on me and I'm stuck with the changes.

How about the release where they changed the formatting button bar into two drop-down menus? I'm glad that you can actually revert it back to a useful formatting bar by right-clicking it and selecting the alternative. But the icon changes, the dropping of the emoticons from Gaim 1.5.x, and more things I just don't care to remember right now, I'm tired of it. This is precisely why I left GNOME for XFCE; I still wanted a GTK+ interface but I didn't want to see any more features stripped away from me and stupid UI/dialog box changes because "the last version is too hard for users." (Granted that excuse is not coming from the Pidgin devs.)

I believe my superior grievance lies with Pidgin devs' claim to investigate what gaim-vv attempted: adding support for webcams and/or microphones for the protocols that support it. They posted that this development would be considered after a stable 2.0 release. Well they've had Pidgin 2.0 release a long while back now, and do I see even a hint about what they said? Nope.

Seriously what are they thinking? I can only imagine that, if in their position, obviously Pidgin is (apparently) the most popular GTK+ based IM client. If it were up to me, I would work on expanding the client to support the other functionalities of the supported protocols that are still not implemented, such as the aforementioned audiovisual support and file-transfer support that actually works on protocols other than AIM's.

Not posting as AC because if this is worthy of bad karma than I deserve it. This had to be said. I welcome a fork that works on making progress instead of focusing on satisfying egotistical interface desires of the developers.

Annoying, but not show-stopping.

[WolfTheWerewolf]

While it is an annoying "feature" that the text box resizes, a better fight for devs to get into would be tackling larger aspects of the program... like making file transfers work, work reliably, in all protocols. Or perhaps adding webcam support or a plug-in for same.

Maybe this isn't really about the text box itself but the attitudes which arose from the suggestion of changing its behaviour.

Re:Good God

[Narpak]

Indeed. Being able to customize your interface to whatever you find most practical and useful is something I really appreciate, were available, and really miss, were it's lacking.

I would argue that there are many different ways to see, edit and input information; and some prefer one and others another. Giving people the ability to chose is definitively a good feature in any product.

Re:Pidgin guys are probably right.

[QCompson]

Options suck. Every option means doubling the number of possible configurations - which makes proper testing of the application twice as hard. It also provides twice as many weird ways that the developers can have their apps configured that will prevent them from noticing issues as they personally develop.

Fine, then with this much negative feedback about a supposed design "improvement", then perhaps the best answer is to scrap the idea and go back to letting the users resize the text input area. Problem solved.

But in this particular case the best solution really seems to be for the Pidgin guys to just tell the forkers to "have fun" and then proceed to ignore them because the feature they're offering is silly and pointless.

It is the auto-resizing text input area that most people feel is silly and pointless.

Re:That's why Open-Source fails on the desktop

[Brigadier]

Why do people think linux should replace OSX or Windows ? That's the whole point it isn't OSX or Windows. I hate people who treat it like a cult, or a company. It isn't that. It's purpose is to evolve based on the need of it's users. Thus the different varieties. This allows people to choose based on there specific application. Something you cannot do with OSX or Windows, or Solaris, or HPUX.

  steps down from soap box, and seeks cover

Re:That's why Open-Source fails on the desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

On the contrary ...

with OSS you have at least the possibility to fork if a project does (no longer) deliver what is useful and wanted by its user base.

  Try that with a closed software, like Windows. Ah, I forgot, Microsoft always listens to their customers and gives them what they want ;-).

Re:How to unfork:

[edraven]

Both options could be included

[X] Allow resizing of chat input area
[X] Automatically control chat input window size

Re:That's why Open-Source fails on the desktop

[grumbel]

Simple example of two options:

[ ] Focus follows mouse
[ ] MacOS style menus

Great, each of those might be something that is wanted by the user. However if you switch them both on you end up with an unusable application, since the moment you move your mouse into the direction of the menu you lose focus. You simply can't combine both.

Now as long as both of these options are in a single application, you might be able to catch that, but what if they are in different application? One application choses 'Mac menus' by default and your window manager uses focus follows mouse by default. The user will have good fun trying to figure out why the menu always disappears when he tries to reach it.

Now this is just an example, but options can always have unintended side effects. And just because option X works and option Y work, that doesn't mean that X and Y work together. Which is the reason why one should try to keep options to a minimum, so that the behavior of the application stays predictable.

That all is of course doesn't mean that all options should be removed, some are important, but one really need to be careful about which to keep and just keeping everything will just lead to a mess.

Re:Good God

[cbart387]

I can see why they're stuck on their solution, but I CANNOT understand why they don't understand that extra UI options are critical to a good app.

I don't agree with bolded section. Giving users ALL the choices available would make it unusable. Though I did like the resizable area myself. It's just an abundance of extra options would be overwhelming. However, that's not to say that they're stuck with that decision. If there's enough of a response I would assume (and hope) that they would change they're minds. Maybe forking it will have that effect but it seems kinda early to be saying that FOREVER it will be unresizable by the user.

... more like, who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to troll or flame, but honestly since when is a feature argument on an open source chat program news worthy?

I can understand the greater implications, but seriously... who cares?

Re:can't blame them

[shutdown -p now]

Can you please tell me why you hate not being able to resize the input box. I use iChat and I love the fact that is expands as I need it.

I'm not GP, but I can tell for myself. Personally, I like my GUI layout to remain static unless I explicitly change it (e.g. by dragging splitters around). Auto-resizing input field breaks this model.

Clearly, this is a matter of personal preference, nothing more. Luckily for me, Psi has an option to choose either behavior...

Re:Good God

[Altus]

Its important to remember though that with many options you increase the amount of testing an application requires. That might not be the case for this text entry box, but having an option of MDI or not is pretty significant. It would be easy for a developer to put in a feature that breaks the option he doesnt use and it becomes necessary for QA to do a full regression in both modes.

People love options, but they arent always whats best for a product. If you can come up with one option that makes 90% of users happy thats probably better than having a preference that doubles the amount of testing you have to do.

This case, however, seems like a good candidate for an option.

Re:GET OFF MY LAUN!

[PitaBred]

Configurable command shortcuts? Who the hell would ever want something stupid like that? I mean, maybe developer types, so it should be hidden in a difficult to access and hidden in a place that's very difficult to divine without serious research and experimentation.

And people wonder why KDE is so popular despite so many companies officially supporting only Gnome.

Re:i for one...

[erikvcl]

I couldn't agree with you more. GAIM is superior to Pidgin for the reasons you mention. I tried to compile Pidgin once, and it requires that pile-of-crap GnuTLS that I couldn't get to compile for the life of me. OpenSSL, of course, works great. I use CenterIM now and couldn't be happier.

This is the "ego bigger than brains" mentality that permeates the open-source community and it pisses me off. This is the same mentality that resulted in Firefox/Thunderbird with their paucity of configuration options compared to Mozilla.

What? You mean I have to configure a "blahdeyblah.blah.blah.yippideedoodaa" parameter in an "advanced configuration" section? How the hell is that "easy-of-use". The old Mozilla provided me that parameter straight-away in a nice graphical dialog box.

Sorry, but some nerd-ass software developer (I include myself in this class of individual) doesn't know jack about UI design. That's right, I, myself, don't know jack about UI design. And neither do you, Joe Linux programmer! Let's listen to the users and make nice easy-to-use software with lots of well-organized options available.

I frequently exchange paragraph-long messages with my friends on IM. I frequently exchange code bits on IM with my colleagues. The Pidgin developers are ignorant idiots thinking that people only send "one-line messages" on IM. Who the hell are they to say that I can't exchange code bits with my colleagues? What's their IM username? I'll send them some source code one line at a time!

Re:Is there a technical reason not to allow both w

[Sancho]

Honestly, the best way to deal with it would be to auto-resize unless the user explicitly changes the size. From that point on, give them control of the window.

But if you look at the images in the linked page, there definitely appear to be some usability concerns here.

Re:This is why people prefer commercial software

[bluefoxlucid]

Microsoft releases whatever they damn well please and everyone has to upgrade or else they can't open docx files from work.

Re:Good God

[DShard]

On a related note, who thought it was a clever thing to make the reply and parent buttons stick out like a sore thumb among the comments on slashdot? I am looking at you CmdrTaco. /shakes fist

Re:i for one...

[Morlark]

What, the concept that different people might actually have different preferences is "childish"? The Pidgin developers removed a feature that many people liked (myself included). When it was requested that they at least give an option for it, they outright refused. That is childish. The ability to fork a project if you think you can do better is one of the great strengths of Open Source software, because it means that the software can't get held back or bogged down by one person's vision of how things "must" be. You can't dismiss this strength as "childish" just because you personally don't need it on this one occasion.

Re:That's why Open-Source fails on the desktop

[myowntrueself]

IMHO this is exactly why Linux will never be able to really replace either Windows or Mac OS X for desktop usage.

Ok Windows I can understand.

OSX? No, I can't understand. An OS in which you have to hack the FUCKING KERNEL (or something almost equally low level) to change the color of the gumdrop buttons on the windows? And when you do this and you install a system upgrade your Mac can end up unbootable?

Apple are downright *hostile* to end-user customisation.

Re:This is why people prefer commercial software

[steeviant]

"But what I do know is that if a version shipped with features nobody wanted, people would stop buying it. Instant negative feedback, especially the prospect of programmers losing their jobs."

What a load of bollocks, you need look no further than Office 12 for an example of a commercial developer losing their way and creating a UI feature that most users are not going to feel is a benefit (the ribbon). Arguably, Vista is the same. It's unlikely that Vista is going to fail as a commercial product, and even less likely that Office will.

"The problem with FOSS is... these guys don't get paid. If you don't like it, that's too bad you ungrateful bastard"

No, that's the problem with commercial proprietary software. It only takes one developer to change the course of an open source product, it may take many thousands of users voting with their wallets before a commercial vendor takes any notice at all, and even then they may decide that their new feature is so great they should proceed regardless. Which is pretty much where Pidgin is at the moment.

From where I sit the score is nil all.

 

Re:I welcome the fork!!

[brezel]

hi!

thanks for posting this...i do not use pidgin myself but it illustrates very well, why developers shouldn't be (the only) decision makers when it comes to application design (yes, i am a developer myself).

Re:Good God

[bruce_the_loon]

And what's the inability to open two files, in different directories, with the same name?

Still. Now. After all these years. How is that a feature? And how difficult is it to fix?