Miles Fidelman wrote:
Paul B. Gallagher wrote:
Rufus wrote:
»Q« wrote:
In <news:1b2dnxuuo8asgchjnz2dnuu7-xodn...@mozilla.org>,
Rufus <n...@home.com> wrote:
[about communication wrt level of support for different platforms]
Be professional. That's all I really want.
Clearly, you have a vision of a much more "professional" SeaMonkey
organization. But IME, telling a community of F/LOSS volunteers what
they should do, without doing any of it yourself, is a lot like farting
in the wind. Maybe you could open a dialog with the people who build
the releases and type up what you learn about multi-platform support in
a clear, "professional" manner?
Anyone that posts feedback is a "volunteer". We all do it.
If one wants to get paid, one should get a paying job. Otherwise, if
you're doing it for the sheer love of doing it, then do the best you can
and stop whining about being a "volunteer".
There's a big difference in what one can demand of a paid employee and
what one can demand of a volunteer. Volunteers donate their time as a
gift that is not mandatory, so the recipient cannot reasonably impose
conditions on the nature and manner of that donation. If one tries,
one will just drive them away. A volunteer who says, "don't push me!"
is warning against crossing that line, and a recipient who complains
about "whining" is showing ingratitude for the gift and disrespect for
the donor.
Bottom line: if one is not paying for it, one is not entitled to
anything. So one should ask nicely or STFU.
Well, that's the dilemma of FOSS projects - long term "professionalism"
and "stewardship" of the project. Some efforts - the Apache HTTPd
Daemon, and the Linux kernel come to mind, as do Sendmail, Postfix,
PostGress - embody a strong, on-term commitment to a quality piece of
software, with quality support; other projects do not. Sometimes it
involves creating a formal organization, perhaps with some funding and
paid staff, or contribution of time by commercial entities with a vested
interest. Sometimes it's through donations.
Clearly Firefox and Thunderbird are actively maintained by the Mozilla
Foundation, which promises a level of maintenance and professionalism -
and it is reasonable to expect as much (particularly if one donates to
the Foundation). SeaMonkey, on the other hand, is essentially
abandonware, that has been picked up as a "community project," only
nominally under the aegis of the Mozilla Foundation. And the cracks in
that model are starting to show - pieces of the code that aren't
maintained at all (e.g, Composer), bugs that never get fixed, the
recurring problems with each new release.
While I'm sure we all appreciate the volunteer efforts of maintainers -
it does seem that more and more people are abandoning SeaMonkey, and it
might be reasonable to start asking - is it time for a new model for
long term support?
Miles Fidelman
I think you have a point about SM "showing it's age"...and I'm sure
there *is* some sort of biz ops structure somewhere...but I certainly
can't figure out how it works - and maybe that's a problem in and of
itself, if none of the folks working the project can, either? This is
one of the things that turned me off when I first began participating
and actively writing bugs on Bugzilla. I couldn't figure out how
anything got accomplished, and watched a lot of UE stuff not being
addressed - or even blatantly refused to be changed by *one* coder even
though three others didn't concur with his implementation.
So I fell back on my initial desire to get and stay actively involved.
The team wanted UE experience, but when a user has an input, it seems
it's generally ignored in deference to the "under the hood" geek-stuff.
I would think that sheer *pride* in doing the things that make SM
different, and stand out from it's parents would be the biggest
motivator and driver to keeping those things alive, working properly,
and improving...I thought that was what "volunteerism" was all about -
not accolades. Or maybe, much like many big projects which collapse
it's just plain gotten too big and is collapsing under it's own
weight...maybe there are "too many" people working on it, and no
consensus or direction can be had?
--
- Rufus
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