Re: Design by Community

[Davyd Madeley <davyd madeley id au>]

On Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 12:53:52PM +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="John Williams">
> 
> > I take Jeff's point as well, although personally I would not have put it
> > in such emotive terms.
> 
> I put it in emotive terms because *someone* has to offset all the hugging
> and back-slapping about Dan's mail. All this positivity about a mail that
> basically says "this community shit is too hard! fuck it!", and just puts
> that meme right back in centre square. Nat and Miguel blogging about it as
> if it were an epiphany. Those two form some kind of leadership perspective
> in GNOME, and look at what they're cheering about...

You've nailed the issue here, Jeff.

What I don't understand is that even if Novell want to develop new
ideas in house, why does this work take so long to bubble to the
surface?

This is the same as Novell's netapplet: people saw hints that this
piece of software existed in screenshots of desktops &c, but
software was still not released.

You can talk about stop energy, but nothing is stopping you doing
the work. What I don't understand (and this doesn't just apply to
Novell) is why that patch couldn't have appeared in the open when it
was written: "here is an idea we've been tossing around at Novell
for a new panel menu", rather than only finding out through leaks
and screenshots.

For the sake of the community; share, and share alike. Otherwise,
one day there will be no community, there will be only corporates in
competition for mind-share, you will have lost the unified product,
the unified experience and no longer benefit from each other's
successes.

This course of action will create a time when GNOME goes the way of
propriortary UNIX: Tru64, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, IRIX... imagine a
world with Novell Desktop, Topaz, Java Desktop, the Hatrack Environment:
all competing products... where is GNOME?

--d

-- 
Davyd Madeley

http://www.davyd.id.au/
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