-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Andrew Gaffney wrote: > > Yep, this is all anyone is trying to say. We aren't paid, so we work on > what we feel like working on, and do what we feel like doing (within > reason). >
This is the great difficulty with any open-source project, and yet most work fairly well (including Gentoo despite all the talk in the last few months). Nobody is paying the devs to be devs. Nobody is paying the ATs to be ATs, nobody is paying the formum mods to keep things clean. Nobody is paying the users to submit bugs, or to humor the flamewars that often follow in bugzilla. Why are the users here? Gentoo meets a need. Why are the devs here? Gentoo meets a need. While they might have different roles, ultimately we all benefit from working well together. What the project needs to do is to create an environment where each can succeed without burning out. This requires effort on all parts, and the occasional application of moderation between the brain/keyboard interface (regardless of one's stance on ML moderation I think we can all agree on this point). I think that this particular debate is coming across fairly divisively, and has the potential to be very damaging. I think we need to choose our words carefully. Ultimately we're all here to scratch an itch of some kind. To the extent that devs work on projects that might not benefit themselves personally we need to recognize and appreciate their charity. For their part devs have to realize that users often do recognize this and often do try to go out of their way to humor some devs abrasive retorts in bugzilla/etc (and this does not in ANY way apply to all, or even most, devs). There are both devs and users which give the larger population a bad reputation, even though their individual contributions might warrant their continued participation in Gentoo - and we all need to recognize this. The fact is we all get further ahead in life when we learn to work together. Some here might not be in the working world yet - trust me - corporate IT is a whole different beast whether you're working for a start-up or an enterprise - say something rash to a customer or partner and you might never work in the industry again (and that goes both ways in the vendor/customer relationship). For those already in the "real world" - it is nice to have a project where one can pick and choose what one works on without having to "keep one's guard up" - but all interactions in life require some level of care if we ant to work together. Ultimately fostering some level of professionalism has to be a goal of the project. It doesn't have to be so dry that there isn't any fun - but raging flamewars will cause the project to bleed contributors, future-contributors, and sponsors (those nice infrastructure servers require power, bandwidth, hardware, and people to run them). And we don't need the bureaucracy associated with most large IT organizations to accomplish this - just being polite goes a long way. When somebody treats you as if you're their personal slave do feel free to point it out, but do so nicely and they'll probably get the point and bug you a whole lot less in the future than if they just get a snappy retort. And extreme problem cases can always be dealt with using technical means (bans/etc). -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFGm4gDG4/rWKZmVWkRAp4qAKCqyok4HGwrEvcqmRulz3HydsgcTwCcCSPp Gct+FtaHsTdbsyEDfuXAkcI= =siL8 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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