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------- Additional comments from chadle...@openoffice.org Thu May 13 11:20:11 +0000 2010 ------- Quoting zhangweiwu, "we should weight the opinion of the people who don't talk instead of getting them here." The problem with that is, it's pretty much impossible to do accurately. People who don't vote don't have a voice. That's true in democratic governments, and it's true here. You could easily say "I talked to 50 people, and all of them wanted this issue fixed." - And you could be completely honest in saying that. But then someone else could say "Well, I talked to 50 people, and they'd rather have SVG import than Text flow text boxes." Which issue gets the votes? Do they both get 50 extra votes? What about all the other issues that people would like to see, but don't know how to vote for. The fact of the matter is - every issue (or, nearly every issue) - would have many, many times more votes than they do now if we somehow got opinions from every human being on the planet. Orders of magnitude more. It wouldn't be 20 votes anymore - it wouldn't be 200, or 200,000 - it would likely be in the millions or hundreds of millions. However, we can't do that. Not everyone in the world cares about text boxes. Not everyone in the world cares about OpenOffice.org. Not everyone in the world cares about computers (as hard as that is to believe). And even for the millions of "Silent users" - we can't presume to speak on their behalf. The only way to know for sure what people want is to have them vote. It's not a perfect system. But it does reflect the feelings of those who (A) know what they want (B) care enough to learn how to vote and (C) care enough to vote. Is that fair? Not necessarily. But, again - even if we did somehow accurately get opinions from every single user of OpenOffice.org - even if we somehow weighted those opinions by time of use, expertise of the user, or whatever you want to use to weight them. Even if we could tear back the language barriers, technical mumbo jumbo, and actually accurately see what everyone really truly wanted.... That would not necessarily mean this particular problem would ever get fixed. Even if this was the #1 priority by far from every user in the world. It doesn't mean it is the priority of anyone who can actually make it happen. This is an open source project. It's not a democracy. It's not even respond-based. It is completely up to the individual coders who want to fix it. No one can force volunteers to complete a certain task. If they don't want to do it, they won't. Now, Sun - or Oracle I guess it is now - and Google (if they are still involved) and maybe some other companies have paid programmers who work on OpenOffice.org. The companies can set agendas for their coders. But, again, their priorities may or may not have anything whatsoever to do with the number of votes on the issue tracker. So - are votes useless? Ultimately, yes, I think they are. And that's based on years of having my votes on the same issues - and none of them getting fixed. But they may give some motivation to people who choose to work on the code. It may sway their decision one way instead of the other - so it's not completely pointless. But it is certainly no guarantee of anything whatsoever. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Please do not reply to this automatically generated notification from Issue Tracker. Please log onto the website and enter your comments. http://qa.openoffice.org/issue_handling/project_issues.html#notification --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: issues-unsubscr...@graphics.openoffice.org For additional commands, e-mail: issues-h...@graphics.openoffice.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: allbugs-unsubscr...@openoffice.org For additional commands, e-mail: allbugs-h...@openoffice.org
