Re: [Gimp-user] Thank you developers, for your patience.

[Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre prokoudine gmail com>]

On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 5:20 PM, Daniel Smith wrote:
> I've been reading a lot of these down the nose "developer vs user"
> emails for what seems like a year now? And it strikes me how much this
> I guess is really a possible byproduct of open source development,
> though I think there are many OS packages, Red Hat, Ubuntu etc that
> are committed to "customer satisfaction" and retainment.
>
> But some of the things you say, Alexandre, you seem to have gotten a
> giant head from being like the sole spokesperson for Gimp. I'm sure
> it's a tiring and thankless role. Sure seems like it. I was just
> reading through this list and actually laughed out loud, considering
> if one called Adobe cust service department and they started out with:
> > This is the core of your delusion.
>
> That's one of the things you get with paying for software, being
> treated like a person. Even if they are the evil empire and are all in
> it for the money.

Well, first of all, I don't think I'm handling this extraordinarily
well. So yes, there's room for improvement.

OTOH, communication between vendors and users in commercial companies
rarely smells of roses. So it's not all that typical for open source
projects.

What I've learned is that no matter how patiently you explain things
or how carefully you choose words, someone somewhere will always get
things utterly wrong, overreact and annoy.

Over last two months I've heard quite a few amazing misconceptions
with "I’m sorry to say this, but it smells like “let’s force our users
into our internal format nobody was really using”." being an obvious
winner in the humour contest and "I hope the XCF format dies" getting
a well-deserved 2nd place.

(For the record, we've always been against the use of XCF by 3rd party
apps, and Adobe takes the same position with regards to PSD. Also, we
too want the existing XCF to die, just for different reasons.)

Finally, what you are percieving as "down the nose emails" are
basically attempts to bring some sense into the discussion that isn't
supposed to be happening anyway, given the already explained status
quo, which is: we will neither revert, nor make it optional".

Alexandre Prokoudine
http://libregraphicsworld.org