On Tue, 2006-02-07 at 17:15 +0100, Finn Gruwier Larsen wrote: > Charles-H.Schulz skrev: > > > In any FOSS community, the community is made of the developpers. The one > > who codes is the one who calls the shots. The rest, albeit valuable > > sometimes, has no other way than respecting the developpers' decisions > > or try to convince them they are wrong. There is hence no question of > > separating the community and the developpers. > > I thought this precision is useful, especially if we were going to make > > yet another thread on how bad the OOo project is to some people. > > I don't agree at all that this should be the case in OOo. Maybe this is > "normal" in open source projects, but I couldn't care less about what's > normal in other open source projects. Our competitor is Microsoft, and > I'm very shure that the developers of MS Office don't make the decisions > of what way the program should evolve. Do you think the new palette > design of the user interface of MS Office 12 was a developer decision? > Sure it wasn't - it was a pure marketing decision. > > I have been doubtful about the realism of the goals in the Marketing > Project, but now I'm beginning to feel really worried...
I wonder how true developer control actually is in the OOo Project? How much decision making power do the developers have and how much are they told to do by their employers? Its similar to editorial freedom of the press when the newspaper owner wants something different from the editor. No way of knowing really. I suspect that if Sun said thou shalt remove EEs, the EEs would be removed irrespective of what an individual hacker wanted to do. But that's life, just the way it is. I think some people are seeing things through rose coloured spectacles. Also I think a lot of people seem to be talking for developers. We don't really know what they think. I'd be inclined to believe developers would respect the professional judgement of people in other parts of the project who like them want the project to succeed and like them put a lot of time and effort, mostly unpaid, into that work. Difficulty is if there are no channels of communication between the marketing project and the developers other than filing issues and possibly reading a mailing list. There really is a place for good old face to face discussions now and again. With Skype it can be done without anymore cost than a mailing list. -- Ian Lynch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ZMS Ltd --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
