On Tuesday 22 February 2011, Gabriel M. Beddingfield wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Feb 2011, John Veness wrote:
> > On 22/02/2011 12:58, Gabriel M. Beddingfield wrote:
> >> What slows things down (IMHO) it the
> >> community whining about how (a) it was all done in secret,
> >> (b) how they haven't released it publicly, (c) how there's
> >> no public repos, (d) how it's not integrated to
> >> bugs.meego.com.... blah blah blah.
> > 
> > Wow. So the problem is the community whining, not the fact that all those
> > things happened?
> 
> Community says:  Why did you not develop this in an open
> manner?
> 
> Answer:  If they did, there probably would not be a
> pre-alpha preview, yet.
> 
> Why?  Instead of working on code, they have to set up the
> project with a mailing list, a forum, community meetings, a
> category in the BTS.  Then they have to work out issues with
> the fact that Swype is not FLOSS... but that they want to
> use it.  People would accuse Intel of betraying open source
> because "USING SWYPE IS NOT APPROPRIATE FOR MEEGO!!"  After
> getting all that crap worked out... THEN they can start
> working on the code?
> 
> Whatever.

this is kinda an outsider perspective, so to be taken with a grain of alt, 
however..
to me is more an issue of "we want to have 100% control on it" that is fine, 
kinda expected and somewhat understandable from a corporate entity, but it 
can't be expected to work on a community project, it can just cause people 
feeling joked, and even leaving.

> >> If the community is such a valuable part of shipping
> >> products on time... where is the community's tablet UX?

in KDE we're making one, and is coming along quite nicely, thanks :p
and yeah, will take time. why? not for decision making process, we're really 
light on that (maybe this could vary from community to community, i dunno) but 
it's just a couple of dudes working on it when they can, every now and then ;)

> > You're taking things to extremes now just to make a silly point.
> > Designing a
> 
> It's not a silly point.  The point is: more community
> involvement means longer time-to-market.
> 
> The extreme of this is Debian, who doesn't even set a
> release date because they know they can't meet it while the
> beaurocracy works things out.

this is an example, let's take other ones...
take GNOME, it releases every 6 months, take KDE, it releases every 6 months, 
with *a lot* of features every release, even with the chronic resource 
scarcity of community-only projects.
both have an huge code base that would take years and years, and probably an 
impressive amount of millions if they were to re-written from scratch behind 
closed doors.

> > But that doesn't mean that community input is useless, and doesn't mean
> > that
> 
> I agree: community input is not useless... and is indeed
> useful.

this becomes hearing feedback from a community of *users*, not anyore a 
community of developers, and that's ok, but makes it radycally different from 
any open source project...
In Dublin, I heard again and again praising MeeGo on how was different from 
Android, that shows a very closed development model, with source packages 
released every now and then, and that's one of the reasons why i still think 
MeeGo is a really cool project.
But now i see parts of the system and quite important ones even are developed 
in an Android fashion..
and it's perfectly fine, but should be made more clear what parts are a proper 
opensource project and what not, where one is expected to be able to 
contribute and where not.

Cheers,
Marco Martin
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