Re: Design by Community

[Thom Holwerda <slakje quicknet nl>]

> 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...
>
> Deeply unimpressed.

What I am missing in your replies is some sort of thank you to  
Novell. They seem to have done some serious amount of work -- behind  
closed doors, but they did it. They released their code for everyone  
to benefit from. So what is the big problem?

How far are you willing to go? How open must the development of new  
features be? Should discussion arise over *every* new feature a  
developer wants to implement? Over every 100 lines of code? Every 50  
lines? Every 25 lines? How far are you willing to go?

As far as I'm concerned, it is up to *developers* to decide how open  
they want *their* development to be-- as long as they abide by  
licensing rules and publish their work for everyone to benefit from,  
of course. Who are we, who contributed *nothing* to the work the  
developers at Novell have done, to demand they use a more open  
development path?

I am wondering how emotional you would have been if all this work was  
done in the same way by an individual group of people *not*  
affiliated with any company...?


Thom Holwerda
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