On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 1:13 PM, Martin Owens
<doctormo@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[...] The first thing I've noticed from this experimental opinionated
stance is a tendency to alienate and frustrate people who want to
collaborate. There are people who will give up their personal visions
for yours without lots of hard data, but most of those are called
employees...
It is impossible for a single product to encompass the personal design visions of a random group of people, who come from different backgrounds, have various levels of experience with UI design, and are targeting diverse sets of requirements. If you want to achieve something, you need a common vision.
As for giving up personal visions, I don't think anyone is being asked to do that. You can share Ayatana's (or, if you will, Mark's) vision and try to contribute accordingly, or you may not, in which case you can fork the code, or start a new UI project, or simply not do anything at all. In any case, this is not an attempt to exclude you or anyone else. Is just an attempt of a certain group of people to concentrate their efforts on a particular set of clearly defined goals so that they can be more productive and actually achieve something.
[...] The key here is 'distribution default'. I will congratulate you on the
decision to prevent choice paralysis in normal users, insisting upon a
single application per function at distribution time is the right
choice. But this is development, this is upstream, that logic may not be
relevant. I notice that you don't insist upon one application per
function available in the repositories or launchpad PPAs.
And if you or anyone else were to create a different UI, I don't think it would be excluded from those repositories either. It is only that the resources of the Ayatana project wouldn't be dedicated to it.
> In Ayatana, we'll take an opinionated stance, and we'll apply some
> common principles to the design process,
This principle isn't common, it's something I haven't seen in any other
projects, even the ones that I would aspire to with regards to design
and vision.
This principle is very common. Indeed, I'd say it lies behind every single successful free software project. Let's make a little Gedankenexperiment: Imagine you find an interesting free software project with an active and dedicated community. When you look into it in some more detail, however, you find quite a number of things you don't like. The code is not organized according to you liking, and the set of features offered doesn't appear quite right to you. Being such a good programmer as you are, you proceed with no further delay to rewrite 80% of the code in order to fix these issues, and send a patch back to the community. Now, back to reality, what would be the likelihood of this patch to be accepted?
I would say, almost none. Why? Because this community formed around a particular vision of what their program should be. The vision was probably set by the original program creator. It was also probably never clearly expressed in words, but it was expressed through the code. For these reasons, when you contribute a patch to an already established project, you are expected to play by the rules of that project. If you don't want to, you are always free to fork the project or start a competing one, but you shouldn't claim that they are excluding you just because the don't want to adapt their vision to yours.
> I have no interest whatsoever in making it possible for anybody to
> have any environment they want - we already have that.
Hmm, I can't actually believe you would say that. It sounds so,
authoritarian. To dictate what is in the best interest of the masses and
removing the choices of those who aren't believers in the one true
vision.
It seems to me you're concentrating too much on the "I have no interest whatsoever..." part of Mark's quote, while deliberately ignoring the "we already have that" part.
It certainly doesn't sound like "I am because of my community", it
sounds like "I am because of what Mark likes to see". Scary in a way.
This can also work the other way around. I could say that your my-customized-to-the-last-pixel-way-or-the-highway stance is a pretty selfish one, and that someone who is willing to sacrifice some of his own very personal needs and desires in order to work on what the large majority of people actually need and can use is a much better community member. What do you think about this?
Principled Regards, Martin Owens
Ditto,
Martín