On 10 Jan 2003, Torgeir Veimo wrote: > but letting people pay the > price of lending support to newbies in order to have a place to discuss > xfree86 related development issues is a bit drastic.
I'm sorry about this too; when I started working with XFree86 I thought I'd found Stallman's trade-off*; instead of working for a software house and being paid to code and support, I could get the buzz of coding; I wasn't being paid, but that was fine since I wasn't getting the hassle of supporting users. (*IIRC, when Richard Stallman started the FSF he said that programs should be free, but that support should cost. Red Hat seems to have managed to follow Stallman's ideal, but although XFree86 has got the first part right, it is trying to give free support too.) I wasn't party to the decision to change the lists, but I think that it is an attempt to spread the support burden more thinly. Until this change, [EMAIL PROTECTED] was the advertised place for people with problems to ask for help. This was a closed, subscription only list, which meant that a very few experienced developers were forced to handle all support calls. I guess that eventually this has got too much for them, so rather than abandon free email user support for XFree86, they moved the support calls to a public list where a lot more people with the knowledge to answer the questions can see them. If everyone tries to answer one or two (or six) questions a week from a struggling beginner, then the load on each of is is very light, and XFree86 gains lots of satisfied new users. Unfortunately a mailing-list isn't a good mechanism for this; for each of us to answer 3 questions, we all have to read 300 or 3000. Perhaps you should think of developing for xfree86 as a privilege, and the price of getting that kick from fixing a bug or adding a feature is that you have to work on the support desk too ? Should XFree86 abandon free user support (and leave it to people like Red Hat who charge for it) ? or can you think of a way of distributing the support queries amongst the developers out on the internet, in such a way that every developer only gets a few calls, and every call gets to someone who can assist with that problem ? -- Dr. Andrew C. Aitchison Computer Officer, DPMMS, Cambridge [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~werdna _______________________________________________ XFree86 mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/xfree86
