unity-design team mailing list archive

[Martin Owens <doctormo@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hey Scott,

I'm not sure I can agree with the following:

On Sat, 2009-09-05 at 13:19 -0400, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> To be clear, Ayatana is not part of Ubuntu.  I think it's new for
> Canonical 
> to have a team dedicated to upstream development and user experience 
> improvements.

That's not that clear at all. Are you saying that "Ayatana is not a part
of Ubuntu the...":

a) Operating System Distribution,
b) Philosophy of Human Behaviour,
c) Super community as managed by the Ubuntu Community Council,
d) Community project of employed and non-employed packagers,
e) Community of users and advocates,
f) Sub-project of Canonical the company for service products,
g) The grand idea of delivering software that human beings can use and
appreciate.
or
h) All of the above

Because if it's all of the above, then it most certainly does include
Ayatana. I tend to think it's as much a project of collaboration and
idea sharing with the community as it is a canonical design team
imparting designs of wisdom on the upstream projects.

> I think questions from other upstream usability experts deserve
> particular 
> attention.  If there are conceptual or design shortcomings, the sooner
> they 
> are exposed, the better.

I did user interface design at college and even I don't think that
upstreams are that inept at user interfaces. I tend to want to see
ayatana as presenting the case for community design needs which most
upstreams don't have as their primary focus.

After all, most volunteer open source programmers are serving their own
needs first and shouldn't really be serving others unless they have a
serious altruistic bent in their core principles by design (like Ubuntu
the community) or are being paid by the end users.

It does read to me a little bit like "Those dumb upstreams need all the
skilled help they can get" which I don't think is true when you consider
primary reasons for free and open source projects compared to the
primary reasons for Ubuntu.

Thoughts?

Regards, Martin