[snipping to keep it short] [ for everyone who's tired of reading these -- sorry. the community's easily as (actually, more) important than the hardware product itself. debates like this are as important (imho) as those debating how much RAM the device has or what cell frequencies should be enabled. ]
I abbreviate here for brevity, not to ignore any points you've mentioned. On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 10:25 PM, Kevin Dean <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Perhaps you allude to this, and if so, I agree. If not, then I ask you > to tak a step back and recognize the varied and diverse reasons that > people value Free Software. I agree. The self-motivated, ready-to-go, already-commited ones aren't the ones I worry about. It's everyone else. Two groups come to mind: 1. The beginners who would be contributors. 2. The coders who are looking for a project to work on. A honey-vs-vinegar approach would help in both areas. > The first day I installed Debian GNU/Linux I was told "Read the > fucking manual". Back then, they weren't nice enough to abreviate it > for me. :) Responding to such a request like this: RTFM: <url of documentation> The old RTFM comment goes back to the older unix days, when you had good printed documentation, but no google. It's fair to assume that people would look for documentation before asking... They already searched plenty to find the mailing list! > Every person told RTFM is a person being told to be responsible for > themselves. Where you see it inspiring a developer to avoid I project, > I see it inspiring a hacker to start hacking. People still choose which projects to spend their time on, as we're really competing with other projects for contributors. It helps not to treat them as spoiled, lazy children. > Again, I don't disagree with you here on principal, but I do question > the logic being asserted - OpenMoko is the ONLY platform advocating > use freedom and control so all of the evidence we have on one side or > the other is questionable at best. Others have pushed conceptual products (in this case, freedom) vs traditional functionality before. E.g. OpenBSD's cryptographic freedom (hence) and security as a cultural decision. As they don't bring (initially) any new functionality to the table at start, we *have* to recruit heavily to build a community. The ones who'd come in for selfish reasons don't see anything for them until someone else has made the system useful. The few exceptions are folks who need specific, easy-to-implement features easily built atop the existing, raw, openmoko stack. IMHO, not too many by itself. It's like a compound interest equation for a savings account. The initial amount put in is how many people believed in the original ideals of the project (remember the account starts at zero, so we only have ideals to start with). What they put in builds interest --- the results of their work interests more people. Those people's contributions (even if it's just evangelizing) adds onto the balance in the account --- building interest themselves. The cycle continues forward. Maybe that metaphor made more sense in my head than out loud. But, everyone's got their buy-in point. The amount of work required to make the device useful/interesting for them. More work than that, and they're not interested. Any coder will tell you that they spend as much time going through documentation and other people's source as they do writing your own. That's where the community comes in: if it's easy to get help, the amount of work spent looking up documentation/help reduces, and we have more developers who were just waiting for the project to hit their buy-in point. Open source projects charge a price in hours worked, not dollars. Never pretend that the former isn't easily worth as much as the latter. -- H. Lally Singh Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science Virginia Tech _______________________________________________ OpenMoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community