Re: response to linus...?

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Fri, 2005-12-16 at 01:14 -0300, Santiago Roza wrote:
> > You're certainly welcome to send whatever response you want, but I'd
> > suggest that there are many better things to do than respond directly
> > to Linus.
> 
> 
> cool then; message acknowledged.  i now understand that we're a
> marketing team that thinks:
> 
> - our brand's image isn't too big of a deal, and we should just stay
> arms crossed if people trashes it in public with inaccurate
> statements.

You seem to be disatisfied with the current responses, and you seem to
want us to respond in a much more high-profile way. But the only thing
that would be comparably high-profile would be something comparably
silly and non-constructive, such as "GNOME users burns Linus in effigy."

Simply releasing something as a press release isn't likely to get much
attention.

I actually think that this can be quite good for us with a large part of
our target market, though it's awful for winning over the highly-vocal
old-style
window-manager-my-way-is-the-only-way-and-vi/emacs-is-a-lifestyle-choice-obsessives  who we'd like to have on our side too, though they are inherently perfectly capable of making stuff work like they want. It's not so bad for people to think of us as obsessed with ease of use, though it is awful for them to think of us as lacking in checkbox features.


Here's a suggested alternative response.
"GNOME announces the Power Tools project, invites developers to add
traditional window-manager options. These extra features will not be
used by default and will not interfere with GNOME's ease of use for
existing GNOME users."

These various freaky options can't be implemented without breaking stuff
in odd ways here and there, but that's the case with the other competing
desktops and WMs, so it's maybe OK as long as we strongly discourage
users to use them. It makes life difficult for maintainers who have to
deal with all the bug reports for features that they never wanted, and
never expected to work, but we've had a few years to get some defaults
working, so maybe we can bear it now for the sake of getting those
"momentum users" off our back.

This might be crack.

-- 
Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com