AbiWord team interview (Red Hat Magazine) [LWN.net]

AbiWord team interview (Red Hat Magazine)

Posted May 11, 2008 22:32 UTC (Sun) by proski (subscriber, #104)
In reply to: AbiWord team interview (Red Hat Magazine) by jordanb
Parent article: AbiWord team interview (Red Hat Magazine)

I disagree. People who like to code on their free time would not want to go to the committee, take days from the vacation, pay for the tickets, all that just to sit there and have virtually no influence over the process.

That's different from somebody representing a large company, who is paid by the employer to go there and who has a much stronger backing.

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AbiWord team interview (Red Hat Magazine)

Posted May 12, 2008 5:55 UTC (Mon) by gravious (guest, #7662) [Link]

I disagree proski :) If you turn down an invite you can hardly complain if things didn't go
your way. How can they have known beforehand that they would have little or no influence? The
areas of deficiencies they site I'm sure would have been tweaked had they been involved, if
not then yell about it during the wrangling process and maybe then you'll have my sympathy.
Time should not be an issue as collaborating on open standards is an inevitable part of a
project like Abiword I'd imagine. I  think the finance thing is a red herring.

AbiWord team interview (Red Hat Magazine)

Posted May 12, 2008 21:27 UTC (Mon) by Tet (subscriber, #5433) [Link]

How can they have known beforehand that they would have little or no influence?

Thus speaks the voice of someone that has never tried participating in a standards process where big corporate interests are involved. I'm not saying they wouldn't have benefited from having someone representing their interests on the committee. But given limited resources, it is almost certain that their time was better spent on hacking Abiword than on getting bogged down in standardization politics.