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KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge softwareKDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge softwarePosted Feb 1, 2009 0:21 UTC (Sun) by malor (subscriber, #2973)In reply to: KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software by jospoortvliet Parent article: KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software We didn't call KDE 4.0 that because it was stable You're right. You called it 4.0 to get more testers. We've been doing this since 10 years I've been there the whole time, and I don't remember you guys ever before calling something 'done' that wasn't. Your .0 releases haven't always been that great, but to my memory, they've always been feature-complete. This time around, tou lied to us to get us to test your software before we normally would. That's new. And people are still pissed, a year later. This isn't coincidence. FOSS is about developers first, users next. The arrogance in this simple statement is breathtaking on two fronts. One is the fundamental belief that users are inferior. On Linux, do you know what a user actually is? Almost always, a user is a developer of another project. And your particular software is very central to the use of their computer, if they chose your flavor of desktop, and if you screw it up, you damage the progress of other projects. They're dependent on you to get it right. Time they have to spend fixing your problems is time they can't spend fixing their own. Further, it's worth pointing out that you lost Linus Torvalds, one of the most famous developers in the world, and yet here you're dismissively handwaving him away, lumping him in with the proletariat, the developers that aren't working on your project. Mere users. Scum. Secondly, if you hadn't noticed, you're writing a desktop. If your focus isn't first, foremost, and always about users, then you picked the wrong hobby. Go write webservers or something. Every day you write code without thinking about users, users, users, is a day that GNOME eats a little more of your lunch. They have come from essentially nowhere to gradually eclipsing you on the desktop. Eight years ago, only the diehard used GNOME. Today, you're in a substantial minority. This should be telling you something. And with 4.0, your focus on the needs of your own team, instead of the needs of your users, further accelerated your slide into irrelevance. Distributions are for users, source code on some developer site is not. This has never really been true. Remember: "users" are the people writing the kernel, too. Your entire comment is damage control, apologia for an enormous mistake. Just admit the damn mistake, apologize, and move on. And stop lying to us. Maybe you'll start regaining some of the ground you've lost.
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KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Feb 1, 2009 11:53 UTC (Sun) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]
You're right in that users are important, but it is very annoying that you simply ignore most that I wrote. We didn't release 4.0 to get more testers nor users, we did it to get more developers.
Well, ok, some parts of KDE needed testers, some parts were ready for that, and benefited from testing. In many other area's (plasma) we knew what the issues were, but didn't want to let all of KDE wait and suffer because it wasn't finished yet.
Again, it was a long-term decision which did hurt users in the short term but benefit all in the long term. You focus on a 1 year period (or even shorter). Linus went away for now - and so did many. Is that bad? Well, it sucks, but when you factor in the increase in speed of development, it is reasonable to expect them to be back. After all, the free desktop has what, 1% of the whole desktop market? So we did hurt a portion of that 1% to be able to get to the point where we could aim for the other 99%.
We're simply more ambitious than you think, I guess.
We can say sorry to those users we've hurt (even though I still think the distributions are to blame as well). But shouldn't the users say thank you now KDE 42 has proven us to be right?
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Feb 1, 2009 22:36 UTC (Sun) by malor (subscriber, #2973) [Link] As soon as you start valuing 'the project' above 'the users of the project', then your development process has gone off the rails.but didn't want to let all of KDE wait and suffer because it wasn't finished yet. KDE is code. It can't suffer. Only your user community can experience pain. You inflicted a great deal of it on them, to benefit some abstract code. From other comments here, it sounds like your users got shut out of bugfixes and maintenance on 3.5 while you guys focused on 4.0. (I switched away when 4.0 shipped, so I haven't been watching that at all.) If that's true, you not only didn't provide a replacement, but also stopped improving the old stuff as well. Your focus shifted so completely to the project that you abandoned the actual users OF the project -- presumably, the original reason you started developing KDE at all. So we did hurt a portion of that 1% to be able to get to the point where we could aim for the other 99%. That is true, but it strikes me as shortsighted. You're punishing the people who trusted you, to go after the people who haven't. Your existing user base is your best advertising tool; their evangelism matters. When you screw them, you get people pissed off -- some of whom are annoyed enough to post screeds to LWN. And if you're willing to screw that 1%, and it works, will you be willing to screw your 5% six or seven years from now? Why would people adopt your desktop when you're focused on your project, and don't care about their benefit? I think you might want to collectively ask yourselves, "Why are we doing this project at all?" If that answer, and your ultimate focus, isn't on making the lives of your users better, every day, then you're probably in the wrong area for development. Users and developers would be well-served by avoiding dependency on your desktop and libraries. You're going up against an entrenched monolith, whose user-abusing mistakes are legion. But they can get away with it, because they're a monopoly. It's those user abuses that, in many ways, prompted the entire Free Software movement. But you're not a monopoly. If you abuse users for the benefit of your project, you ultimately harm it more than you help it. You and GNOME both are tiny players, goldfish among sharks. If you're not obsessively focused on user benefit, then the other teams who ARE will take them away from you. I'm sure you want your project to move faster, but no matter how good your program is, people won't take it up based on technical merit alone. Just look at Sony's decisions with Beta -- chasing off users they didn't like, porn-mongers, ended up being a huge blow to the format, eventually driving it off the market. If you continue doing this sort of thing, you'll end up with the best desktop that nobody uses. Growth rates are always off how many users you have already. If you double your annual growth rate from 12.5% to 25% by abusive development practices, but cut your community in half in so doing, it'll take three years just to get back to where you started, and it'll take seven years to get back to parity with where your project would have been at the 12.5% growth rate. The real numbers won't be that large, but carefully, carefully consider anything that makes a user switch away. Each and every one is a seed that can grow into more users -- and, if you get lucky, more developers. Failing to water seeds you already have because you want to hike to what looks a bigger field on yonder mesa is a good way to starve.
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