unity-design team mailing list archive

[Martín Soto <donsoto@xxxxxxxxx>]

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