All the points that everyone has brought up, they *are* real problems for us and we (mostly) know it. At least a few times a week, for instance, we make decisions including the consideration that we want the community to continue helping us and being involved in testing new software/products and in contributing to the product (with patches or plugins.)
I think we're trying to find the 'right' solution between Joe Sixpack ease-of-use and hackability. Erland's certainly right that complaining helps, and we can take an action-item to communicate back, too. :) It seems sometimes like there's a clear trade-off between closed-source, reliable, limited, friendly products and those that are open-source, unreliable, hacker-friendly, but user-hostile. However, I think there are good paths down the middle as well. Apple does have success with the first course, but it's far from crystal clear to me that their success is DUE to those four things alone. We have to develop our own synthesis (or gestalt!) for why our products are better, and I think help from the community and an open source server can continue to be part of that. Software quality is always a challenge, and we have an extremely small team to try to make it work. As you've no doubt realized, community-filed bugs are an incredibly important part of it. I was able to hire another QA engineer recently despite the economy, and he's freed up some additional time for me. We have a plan for test automation and sharing test plans with the community so that they can help contribute (something Dean and I have wanted to do for years), and I'll post separately on those as they get closer. I feel like I have to point out there have been some big improvements since the acquisition, too. The in-house development team is many times as large as it was when I joined Slim! It was Dan Sully and Dean part time and Andy part time (when he wasn't doing SN ops)... and there was a period when it was only Dean part time and Andy part time and the community! I sure don't miss the days when I'd find a bug and file it in Bugzilla, but then didn't have anyone to assign it to. And to have been able to hire so many engineers who already knew the product and had an interest in improving it is unheard of in my career! As Michael said, we're not Slim Devices any more, but there is still a core spirit left from those of use that joined before the acquisition, and from new team members that know that Logitech bought us because we had something special, and whatever we do next, we don't want to lose the special! There have been some personnel changes, but there's still a lot of the original flavor remaining, in my opinion, even if some of us have to spend more time working on detailed budgets and attending meetings in Fremont than we did in the Slim days. -- ChrisOwens Christopher Owens QA Manager ch...@slimdevices.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ChrisOwens's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4240 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=66745 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
