Christian Einfeldt wrote:
If I can offer a suggestion for you, I would suggest that you do the same kind of systematic campaign for other issues. I really like you, Daniel, but you do lose my attention when you get hot under the collar.
Christian:
I am certain that sticking my own comments in here is a bad idea. However, your comments touch on some of the problems that the OOo Project is facing, so I'm going to do so anyway.
I suggest that an open source project in which someone who volunteers as much as Daniel does has trouble being heard is a project that is becoming dysfunctional.
Think about it: Daniel's a member of the Community Council, heads up one project, and actively comments and contributes to several others. Yet he has trouble getting things done. If someone like that has trouble, what hope is there for anybody else to make a contribution by volunteering? People with less determination than Daniel will simply walk away.
OOo is becoming a huge project, one of the leading projects in the open source world. Our responsibility to the world is enormous.
This is all the more reason to develop an atmosphere that encourages more participation. What you call "boring," I'm afraid, can also be called more centralized and bureaucratic. "The challenges of the muckrakers" is not being incorporated - instead, they seem to being pushed aside. For that matter, even the Community Council doesn't seem to be listened to.
I agree with you about the potential importance of OOo, but I also think that the project is also at serious risk of sabotaging itself in several ways. At a time when more people are needed, exactly the sort that are needed are being pushed away, and some wrong decisions are being made without them.
I don't say any of this lightly. I've spent a lot of time teaching and writing about OOo, and it means a lot to me. However, I also think that OOo is on the brink of trouble. And I don't think that accepting that those in authority know best is the answer.
-- Bruce Byfield 604-421-7177 http://members.axion.net/~bbyfield
