Re: Looking for community managers or enthusiasts!

[Alberto Ruiz <aruiz gnome org>]

2012/11/15 Benjamin Otte <otte gnome org>

The general response I got to that post was either no response at all, talking
behind my back about what what a bad person I am (at least that's what others
told me) or - and this was the most concerning response for me - "You shouldn't
say things like that." And that response came multiple times from very different
GNOME contributors. So the lesson I learned back then is that rule number 1
about the GNOME project is that you don't talk about the GNOME project.

If you ask me, I think you should have thought twice on whether what you were writing was accurate, whether those opinions came out of actual facts, or whether you were just somewhat disappointed and decided to rant as an emotional outlet.

You have to admit that when someone is a somewhat relevant member of the community, saying such things implies certain responsibility and sends certain message to the outer public.

I joined GNOME in 2003, and it is very easy to see how thriving this community is right now, we have more contributors than ever, we have more focus than ever.

The one thing that was somewhat true is that we have less corporate support, back then IBM, Sun, Novell, Nokia and many other people were looking at GNOME as a platform to build products from. These days that's not the case. Market has changed, and sure, getting a job where you can do GNOMEy stuff is hard.

But let's be honest, this is, by no means, any worse than the state of affairs in 2001, we've been in a way worse situation before, with way less contributors and way less accumulated knowledge and experience. And we moved forward.

I think that some of the old farts like us are somewhat discouraged that we are not in the place where we thought GNOME would be by now (10x10 or GNOME based phones, or something like that), and it is easy to lose enthusiasm over time.

The reason why a lot of people were upset about that blog post is that it could take enthusiasm away from newcomers or people considering joining to help us.

Now let's check the facts, look at what we've accomplished in the latest couple of years. 3.0 was a major effort, GSettings, Gtk+, GNOME Shell, PyGObject...
I am humbled by the ammount of cordination and shared vision that it takes to come up with all of what we've done.

Sure, it's not perfect, sure we have many challenges, but it's hard to look at the hard facts and not be amazed.

Yup, some of the old farts might be tired, people evolve, change, and want to do new things, but it is our responsibility to encourage the newer generations.

If the message we send to the new contributors is "Don't bother, this is a dead end", who is going to want to join? Would you imagine Linus Torlvads saying how awful the Linux kernel project is just because he is tired of it or somewhat discouraged?

TL,DR;

There's nothing wrong with expressing your opinion, none is asking you to stop doing that, but what we say have consequences, and being a relevant member of the community as yourself, poses some responsibility in what you say. Plus, we have many reasons to celebrate and enjoy GNOME as a project and a community these days.

Fwiw, I still don't think Emily should characterize me as "break[ing] API’s at
random" and "purposefully ensuring that [..] themes cease to work", but I think
she has all the right in the world to do that as long as I get the right to use
my choice words to answer to that. I'd rather have her calling me that than
nobody saying anything at all.

> I can understand that their intentions are noble, but the last time someone
> took their chances we ended up with:

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME#cite_note-6
>
Fun fact: I didn't know I ended up on Wikipedia (Someone should file a bug
against Wordpress' pingback feature). Isn't it discouraged to cite blogs on
Wikipedia? [1] :)

Benjamin

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Blogs_as_sources

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--
Cheers,
Alberto Ruiz