Re: Roozbeh's post..

[Richard Hoelscher <richardhoelscher gmail com>]

On Tue, 15 Mar 2005 09:09:21 -0800, Sriram Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com> wrote:
> I was reading roozbeh's post:
> 
> http://www.advogato.org/person/roozbeh/diary.html?start=0
> 
> and the 3rd paragraph is of interest to me considering our recent
> turmoil in d-d-l.  Do we really have a problem here?  We should be
> honest with ourselves about our weaknesses otherwise we'll never be
> able to fix it.

I quietly used GNOME for many years and didn't get involved at all
until the start of 2004. For the most part, I didn't feel that GNOME
was lacking in any meaningful way, and was quite loyal to this
particular desktop and free software in general. I didn't even think
to help out until I wondered why Red Hat was still shipping
bowling-shoe-ugly XBoard, then started thinking about how Aisleriot
would rock with vector graphics....

Part of my attitude as a user came from thinking that GNOME didn't
need my help. The GNOME project is quite good at that presenting a
nice, shiny finish. Along with 2-month feature freezes, this is a good
thing.. it just happens to work against developers looking for itches
to scratch.

I suppose if I tried another DE, complained about bugs or missing
features, and saw them implement it, I'd be more likely to get hooked
as a loyal user. I would definitely brag about it.

<snip>
> We should spend some effort in trying to recruit more people.
> Stuff like what happened this past week makes it harder.  The problem
> occurs in the fact that the pool of people we draw from are the
> same people we tend to have conflicts with because they want a
> technical desktop.

Those who want a technical desktop are not necessarily from the same
pool of people you may want to draw help from... it's easy to find
them because they are just kicking and screaming in the shallow end.
Perhaps those dudes in the lazy river would like to help, they just
need a bit more egging on... handing out early beta LiveCDs like candy
may help.

> I'm looking to see if what I'm thinking is really a concern or just
> arm chair musings that'll get me in trouble. :-)

It's a concern, but I think it is nothing insurmountable. The
gnome-love project helps, but there's small problems with awareness of
it and similar efforts like the translation project. (Paths like
g.o->d.g.o->'Getting Involved' doesn't do what you may think, and yes,
I realize I'm volunteering to fix it by mentioning it.)

-Richard Hoelscher
http://rahga.com/svg/