Miles Fidelman wrote on 1/19/2015 4:34 PM:
Paul B. Gallagher wrote:
Rufus wrote:
»Q« wrote:
In <news:1b2dnxuuo8asgchjnz2dnuu7-xodn...@mozilla.org>,
Rufus <n...@home.com> wrote:
[about communication wrt level of support for different platforms]
Be professional. That's all I really want.
Clearly, you have a vision of a much more "professional" SeaMonkey
organization. But IME, telling a community of F/LOSS volunteers what
they should do, without doing any of it yourself, is a lot like farting
in the wind. Maybe you could open a dialog with the people who build
the releases and type up what you learn about multi-platform support in
a clear, "professional" manner?
Anyone that posts feedback is a "volunteer". We all do it.
If one wants to get paid, one should get a paying job. Otherwise, if
you're doing it for the sheer love of doing it, then do the best you can
and stop whining about being a "volunteer".
There's a big difference in what one can demand of a paid employee and
what one can demand of a volunteer. Volunteers donate their time as a
gift that is not mandatory, so the recipient cannot reasonably impose
conditions on the nature and manner of that donation. If one tries,
one will just drive them away. A volunteer who says, "don't push me!"
is warning against crossing that line, and a recipient who complains
about "whining" is showing ingratitude for the gift and disrespect for
the donor.
Bottom line: if one is not paying for it, one is not entitled to
anything. So one should ask nicely or STFU.
Well, that's the dilemma of FOSS projects - long term "professionalism"
and "stewardship" of the project. Some efforts - the Apache HTTPd
Daemon, and the Linux kernel come to mind, as do Sendmail, Postfix,
PostGress - embody a strong, on-term commitment to a quality piece of
software, with quality support; other projects do not. Sometimes it
involves creating a formal organization, perhaps with some funding and
paid staff, or contribution of time by commercial entities with a vested
interest. Sometimes it's through donations.
Clearly Firefox and Thunderbird are actively maintained by the Mozilla
Foundation, which promises a level of maintenance and professionalism -
and it is reasonable to expect as much (particularly if one donates to
the Foundation). SeaMonkey, on the other hand, is essentially
abandonware, that has been picked up as a "community project," only
nominally under the aegis of the Mozilla Foundation. And the cracks in
that model are starting to show - pieces of the code that aren't
maintained at all (e.g, Composer), bugs that never get fixed, the
recurring problems with each new release.
I am willing to be shown to be wrong but on this I do believe that
Composer was abandoned long before SeaMonky became a "project" instead
of a "product" of Mozilla.
It has long laguished unserved and under-developed for, perhaps,
decades. For good reasons.
In fact, there is little to be served by even discussing it.
The notion of WYSIWYG Web design software is largely an abondoned issue.
I go back to the 1970s with this. When companies tried to develop
programs that created code from WYSIWYG UI input to create "multimedia"
programs.
It never worked well enough to be successful. And I doubt it ever will.
Countless companies I used to work with back that tried do do it back
then are all gone.
There is nothing better than humans knowing how to write correct code
and doing it.
Count the arrows in my back. I was a pioneer. I know this stuff.
Back to the late 70s with Sony, Laserdisc, "interactive video", all
that. I was there, I spoke on it, sold it, marketed it.
I wrote programs for it. Was National Marketing Manger for it.
There is not likely, in my lifetime, any program that can take crappy
user input via some friendly UI and turn into useful executable code,
HTML, script, whatever.
The, perhaps, operative term there is "in my lifetime." I'm almost 65.
I sincerely doubt this will happen before my demise.
I've been doing this since about 1982.
I'm not from Missouri but, okay, "Show me."
I won't say definitively that it won't happen. But you can roll me over
in my grave when it does.
--
Ed Mullen
http://edmullen.net/
"I'm too shy to express my sexual needs except over the phone to people
I don't know." - Garry Shandling
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