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KDE on KDE 4.0 (Groklaw)KDE on KDE 4.0 (Groklaw)Posted Jul 19, 2008 10:15 UTC (Sat) by malor (subscriber, #2973)In reply to: KDE on KDE 4.0 (Groklaw) by sebas Parent article: KDE on KDE 4.0 (Groklaw) We simply put the health of the project above the gusto of some users And that's exactly the problem. You chose to screw over the early adoption crowd by releasing software that was glaringly broken, and calling it 'stable'. Point-zero releases mean something to the rest of the world, and blaming the users for not understanding that YOUR use of that release term was different than everyone else's is entirely disingenuous. YOU blew it, not the users. You cared more about some nebulous project goals than the actual people who are trying to get real work done with it. And you didn't even get what you wanted; any short-term bug reports you may have gotten have been entirely outweighed by the credibility loss you've suffered. You're further compounding that loss by now blaming users for your mistake. By losing credibility, you lose users, which means you also lose testers. So, to get a short-term testing bump, you've sacrificed future testing. You ate a bunch of your seed corn. If you want more testers, you need to recruit them honestly, not by deception. You recruit testers from the pool of users, and you get users by providing stable software releases that are actually stable. If you try to fool users into being testers, they'll stop being both.
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KDE on KDE 4.0 (Groklaw) Posted Jul 19, 2008 10:47 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] Yeah. Point-zero releases mean 'unstable and dangerous, early adopters only' to the rest of the world, and have for *decades*.
KDE on KDE 4.0 (Groklaw) Posted Jul 19, 2008 14:38 UTC (Sat) by malor (subscriber, #2973) [Link] A point-zero release means that the devs think a piece of software is stable and feature-complete. It's a claim that it's done and ready for public consumption. Now, reality often differs from that. Some organizations do better than others, but at least the devs are trying. If a point-zero release is broken, it's at least inadvertent.In this case, neither of those things were true. It was a point zero release that the devs knew perfectly well was very unstable, with an API still in flux. Not everything was even written yet. Calling that a .0 release, no matter how many caveats you hang off it, is guaranteed to mislead users who aren't really paying attention that day, or who figure that the people warning them away are overreacting; this is KDE, after all. How badly could it be broken? Call it 4.0 beta something and everyone is happy. Nobody gets mad if it falls apart into smoking pieces. Beg and plead for testers if needed. Calling it even an RC candidate would have been misleading, since it wasn't ready to be released yet. Giving it full point-zero status was an outright lie. It netted them a minor short-term gain with a probable larger long-term loss; how many users are on GNOME now because of this? Even if it's just a few hundred, that's a real loss for a gain that appears, as far as I can see, entirely theoretical.
KDE on KDE 4.0 (Groklaw) Posted Jul 19, 2008 14:41 UTC (Sat) by malor (subscriber, #2973) [Link] (oh, and before you start listing commercial software with borked .0 releases; payware sometimes has to ship to make the quarter. Open source has no such need. There's no fiscal pressure to release before a product is ready.)
KDE on KDE 4.0 (Groklaw) Posted Jul 20, 2008 19:08 UTC (Sun) by mikov (subscriber, #33179) [Link] Technically, I think you are right. KDE lost credibility and potential users/testers because of this. But I also think that there is no need for all this negativity. Everybody is bound to screw up once in a while. While they failed in labeling the release or communicating it, they didn't fail as developers - the technology is great (or will be) - and that's what really matters. I think it is important for KDE users and supporters not to make a too big deal out of it.
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