In message <894cbbba-43cf-47cf-9e73-a3a7a2504...@bitstream.net>, Tim
McNamara <tim...@bitstream.net> writes
On May 23, 2009, at 5:05 PM, Anthony W. Youngman wrote:
In message <1243107160.13852.64.ca...@mung-papu>, Ari Torhamo
<ari.torh...@gmail.com> writes
The first option is achieved by handling everything a non-programmer
can do: managing bugs, helping new users, writing the newsletter,
etc.
The second option is achieved in two ways: helping expand our
community (and hoping this way more programmers will join on a
long-term perspective), or hiring someone (with decent money) to let
him learn the code and implement the feature/fix the bug you want.
You don't quite seem to get Tim's point: everybody can't and doesn't
need to participate every project they find useful - especially when
they don't consume the resources of the project in question (more
than
marginally). Most people don't contribute equally to things in their
life - people specialize, which is good, because they have different
lives, situations, skills and talents. It's good to encourage
people and
make them aware of the ways to contribute - and then leave it to
them.
Unfortunately, Tim's point is at odds with the philosophy of free
software - which can be pretty succinctly stated as "he who writes
the software makes the rules".
Ummm. That's not the philosophy of free software.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html
Indeed, projects governed by Anthony's description of the philosophy
tend to die quickly or get forked and the original developer loses
control over it.
Well, if somebody's writing code, they're not dead, so if they follow my
philosophy then by definition they CAN'T be dead ...
And, having been involved in a project (actually one I started), then a
new developer took over from me and took the project in a direction I
didn't like, but it wasn't a fork. He took over the coding. The only way
I could have stopped him was to do more code myself (and I didn't have
time).
And while I think that Graham is often more "bad cop" than
necessary (I've fallen foul of him too :-) he does have somewhat of
a valid point - if you're not prepared to put in any work then why
should other people put in work on your behalf?
Because if those things adversely affect my use of the application,
the odds are very good it adversely affects someone else's and maybe
lots of someone else's use of the software. Graham's idea (I am
interpolating here, he can correct me if I'm wrong) that "people
should be willing to put into the project is very valid." My point
was that the form of those contributions is going to vary with
people's abilities.
Agreed. My main contribution in the past was proof-reading, and Graham
expected me to contribute patches. Bit difficult if I'm proof-reading a
hard copy and don't have a system that can make patches.
For reasons already mentioned, I'm not going to learn Scheme and I'm
not going to contribute code. It is very myopic to define "helping"
as "writing code" (this is a widespread problem in the FOSS
community). On the other hand, I am a psychologist with some knowledge
of how people interact with information and those skills might offer a
way to contribute and I have tried to do that. Also, my use (and
others') of the software, feedback on its usability, etc. is of utility.
But at the end of the day, if you don't code, you don't have direct
influence on the project. And as I know from experience, "usability" and
all the other "soft" stuff is very subjective. What's usable to one
person is a pain in the neck to someone else.
My example of this is "reveal codes" in WordPerfect (oh - and I hate
OpenOffice because it's a copy of MS Office and I find their usability
decisions make the whole thing unusable - the more WordPerfect tries to
become Word-like the less usable it is). My brother had a similar
experience with "unusable" emacs - he now thinks its wonderful - it
hasn't changed, he has.
But at the end of the day, as I say, he who writes the code makes the
rules. If you're not prepared to get your hands dirty, you are reliant
on other people doing what you want, and they are free to (indeed, quite
likely to) ignore you unless you're prepared to make it worth their
while.
Cheers,
Wol
--
Anthony W. Youngman - anth...@thewolery.demon.co.uk
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