Re: push back on negative articles

[Olav Vitters <olav vitters nl>]

On Sun, Aug 19, 2012 at 10:08:19PM -0400, Karen Sandler wrote:
> our press about the new release? I think a free software community run
> project is different than a company's product in that we'll always be a
> work in progress. It's ok to talk about areas that can be improved for
> future, for example. I do think there's a lot of great stuff happening

I think that is exactly the problem.

It is working for a company vs the outside view. These can have a total
mismatch. E.g. I knew a company where the outside view was "really good
and professional company", while the inside view was more like "what a
freaking mess". The inside thought on the professional reputation was
nothing more than "our competitors are fortunately in a bigger mess than
us, but that is not going to be forever".

In free software, you can see everything that is going on inside.

If you can point out loads of things that can be improved, the likely
assumption is that things are completely broken. While actually you
cannot conclude that; you know how to improve, but you don't know at
what level you're currently at.

> that I gets overlooked in an effort to zone in on juicy disagreement and
> we can probably help with that by making sure we take opportunities to
> talk about the good things.

For Bruce Byfield I read various of his previous articles. I think most
is pretty poorly researched/interpreted. What we could do is to explain
our reasoning. Initially I didn't see them, but I did notice a few
articles which were written in a totally different style (e.g. GOPW).

But I fear we might then reinforce his views if we go too much in a
point to point basis.

I think we should keep it simple. For the GNOME release notes, we added
a short sentence: "Since the last version, 3.2, approximately 1275
people made about 41000 changes to GNOME.". I'd like to make a chart out
of such a sentence starting with as old as history as possible.

Doing historical analysis is going to cause some issues, because with
Git it is pretty easy to give the author. Not sure how often it was used
in SVN days. CVS especially might be iffy. I know the CVS->SVN->Git
conversions weren't always smooth. So the repository switches should be
noted in the graph.

Furthermore, I'd like to put the start of the GNOME 3 development in
there as well.

What I'm after is a chart like Michael Meeks gives about LibreOffice:
http://people.gnome.org/~michael/data/2011-06-03-contributors.ods for an
example. Note that I'm after all contributors.
-- 
Regards,
Olav