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?

Pigeons

Just can't get our act together. It's why we've never been able to get past our image as disorganized and in general lower than the other birds.

Re:Pigeons

Mmmm, forked Pidgin, reminds me of my last Thanksgiving dinner.

GET OFF MY LAUN!

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

Re:GET OFF MY LAUN!

There are two "U"s in lawn.

Is there a technical reason not to allow both ways

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Which is why Pidgin offers the use of plugins. Yet the developers refuse to add a "resize input area" plugin to the list of default plugins (despite the demand) for fear of cluttering up the plugin area.

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

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.

More options are always better!

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.

Re:More options are always better!

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:More options are always better!

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.

Thankfully, open source has lots of balls, and you can always clone someone else's balls and use them if you don't like the way that someone is playing with their balls.

That's why Open-Source fails on the desktop

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.

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

All the Windows clients here use Pidgin for their IM, and it's one of the clients recommended by IT for the internal IM server.

All Too Often

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 ...

Re:All Too Often

How about asking actual users before starting to code anything? Or at the very least, fellow programmers who work on the same project?

when i want an actual user's opinion, i'll beat it out of him

come on, every developer's thunk it at least once...

How to unfork:

Add the following in Preferences window:

[X] Allow resizing of chat input area

Find *what* utterly ridiculous?

"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.

The debate is now over...

...because their Trac is slashdotted. Problem solved.

Another bad decision by the pidgin folk

This wouldn't be the first time the pidgeon folk have decided to change the interface and refused to let people keep things the way they liked. Forks have been threatened before over their decision to hide protocol icons as well. I'm glad they separated the gui from the rest of the program - both this and the protocol icon decision really bug me.

The fork page...

For anyone interested, the fork is called "Funpidgin" and can be found here [sourceforge.net].

The summary makes light of it, but the Funpidgin page explains that their intention is to respond more directly to the requests of the user community. In addition to the feature mentioned in the summary, Funpidgin has implemented some others [sourceforge.net], and will presumably continue adding user-requested features (while still integrating upgrades from the pidgin codebase, presumably).

Forks are both good and bad; this one is no exception. On the one hand it "wastes effort" and can duplicate work. On the other hand, it can give the user community (which isn't homogeneous) the product(s) they want. It can encourage useful competition. Often the end result will be better than if no fork had occurred. Another example is the Compiz/Beryl fork, which created some duplication for awhile, but ultimately turned out for the best since the merged Compiz Fusion includes the best features from both (a stable core and all the whiz-bang features users wanted, in the form of plugins).

If both the Pidgin and Funpidgin developers work to provide something that their respective users find worthwhile, then what's the problem?

Considering my general hatred of the Pidgin UI

Considering my general hatred of the Pidgin UI, no, I don't find this ridiculous.

Let's start with Pidgin's UI Sucks [xenoveritas.org], which details some of the weird UI decisions made back around version 2.1. Fortunately they've fixed almost all the issues listed in that post.

More Pidgin Bashing [xenoveritas.org] is just a bug, so let's skip ahead to Pidgin's Crappy Formatting Icons [xenoveritas.org] which they have not fixed.

If I ever had the time to, I'd like to write a new UI for libpurple, Pidgin's backend. I have some ideas - but not enough time to actually learn how to use libpurple.

Maybe I can help with this fork, called... uh. Hm. The summary doesn't appear to mention it.

Ah, here we go: funpidgin [sourceforge.net].

can't blame them

Ya know, I can't blame the community for this fork. The gaim/pidgin developers have had a bad history of 'God complex'. Hell, just recently they refused to make any changes to the way Pidgin handles SASL authentication to XMPP servers due to a change in the 2.4 codebase that completely breaks SSL encryption to the OpenFire XMPP server, whereas the 2.3 codebase AND every other XMPP client seems to not have any issues. Their response was something along the lines of "yeah, well we're doing it right..every other client is doing it wrong". I find that hard to believe. This ultimately leaves me with 2 options: either don't upgrade past version 2.3 of Pidgin, or use another client. And yes, not being able to resize the input text box drives me absolutely crazy. I look forward to a forked version addressing this and the XMPP SASL authentication issues.

Re:Good God

I think we ought to formulate the Slashdot law, in a similar spirit to Godwin's law:

Slashdot Law: As a conversation on Slashdot grows longer, the probability of comparing someone to or bashing Microsoft approaches 1.

Re:Good God

rather:

No slashdot thread is complete without at least one (1) Microsoft bash.

Corollary: As it adds to the completeness of the thread, it will be modded informative.

Re:Good God

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.