From: Luke S. <lsc...@us...> - 2004-03-17 16:29:31
|
On Wed, Mar 17, 2004 at 04:59:24PM +0100, Simone Caldana wrote: > Il giorno 17/mar/04, alle 16:32, Luke Schierer ha scritto: > > >i fail to see how, when programing something for your own use and/or > >the > >use of your friends having users is anything other than a side benifit. > >what you fail to understand is that as a user you are a second class > >citizen. you are still thinking in terms of the comercial software > >world > >that is user-oriented because they need to make money off of you. if > >you > >paid me something then you could expect me to care about your problems. > >as it is, you should rejoice that i even listen: i don't have to, i > >could utterly ignore you and the things that i want <insert oss project > >name here> to do would still happen. > > Let me do a bit of trolling, but I am curious. > > I agree that the model you described up there: it is definitely > someting within your rights, and OSS developer does not equal to > working-for-free-moron or even freedom-idealist. > After all, one could always fork the project. > > Back to the point of contributions ("if you paid me something then you > could expect me to care about your problems") I wonder if the Gaim > development team ever received some donations (money or else) and if > you're willing to receive such donations. Moreover, if such donations > will determine what things are being done and/or internal development > priorities. > > Do you think that building a transparent model for handling donations > would be "needed", "ethical", or what? > > for example, what if I am a rich moron that would donate 10K EUR if the > official branch of gaim will contain a preference to disable buddy list > tooltips? Will you accept them? Will you comply to the request? > > Let me say I am not an OSS fundamentalist or whatsoever. I am only > interested in your point about this "problem". > > Thanks in advance for your answers. lol, okay, i mostly deserved far worse a troll than this. I should know better than reply to my email when i'm in a bad mood ;-). anyway, yes IF we had some donation system going, and IF you donated, then from my point of view at least we would be morally compelled to let your requests influence the direction we take. as to if its needed or desirable, i would say no, mostly because if we did such a thing, we really ought to set it up such that more than just those of us with cvs access benifit from it, gaim accepts many patches each year and those who submit them are often doing the very work that we dislike, and thus more in lines with what people would actually be donating to get done, because while the number of downloads and page views we get a month make gaim one of the biggest if not the biggest third party instant messanger, and thus we must be doing something right, no one requested tabs, or the big buddy list, we just decided they are a good thing and worked on them. now perhaps people WOULD enjoy file transfer, or an option to disable tooltips. or any of the other 700 requests in the feature request tracker. but that number of requests, all of which are useful to some subset of users, gives you an idea at the scope of the problem involved in choosing what to implement and what not to. how many people would really use an option to disable tooltips? is the benifit of it worth the cost of having yet another preference? as someone already pointed out, gaim has many preferences already that only make sense to a subset of users. I'm just as sure that most users do not understand the function of at least some of the preferences as i am that the ones that don't make sense aren't the same for everyone. say we were perfect at sorting preferences into a preference dialog. say we even got them to the point where in viewwing any given page of preferences, they all made sense. would you still want umpteen million pages of them? this sounds like there is some magic number of users after which a preference becomes viable, which isn't the case at all. in reality, its rather closer to my original reply. currently preferences get added when we as developers cannot decide on a single behavior or when the behavior is clearly something that everyone will set differently (how long is it before you are "idle", what should your default font style be? speaking of which, someone in this thread asked about the font page of prefs... I'll bet they primarily use a protocol that we don't support formatting on, or which inherently doesn't have much formatting). so we have been rejecting a preference, hidden or otherwise, to disable tooltips. would it be useful to some people? absolutely. mostly windows users? almost 100% of users asking for this only use windows. would it be useful to most? or even near a 1/3rd? no, i really don't think that once the relevent gtk bug is fixed it will be useful to 1/3rd of win32 users, much less 1/3rd of all gaim users. are these fractions anything significant? no, i'm just making them up as I go along. luke > > > > >luke > > > >On Sat, Mar 13, 2004 at 09:09:02PM -0500, Gregory F. March wrote: > > > >Content-Description: original message before SpamAssassin > >>Date: Sat, 13 Mar 2004 21:09:02 -0500 > >>From: "Gregory F. March" <ma...@gf...> > >>To: Evan Martin <ma...@da...> > >>cc: "Gregory F. March" <ma...@gf...>, > >>gai...@li... > >>Subject: Re: [Gaim-devel] Freakin' annoying tooltips > >> > >> > >>On Mar 13, 2004, Evan Martin <ma...@da...> wrote: > >> > >> |As Hans pointed out, the GTK developers have a lot of better things > >>to > >> |do than download older versions of GTK to try to reproduce a bug > >> |someone's reporting, especially when they have a ChangeLog entry > >> |that indicates it's been fixed. > >> | > >> |Their response was entirely reasonable. I think they'd be happy to > >>fix > >> |the problem if you gave them a reasonable (that is, includes version > >> |information, debug traces, or whatever else they requested) bug > >>report. > >> > >><flame> > >> > >>See, the problem with Hans' response (and several of the online and > >>offline responses to that bug) is that these "better than everyone > >>else" OSS developers who volunteer all their time, blah, blah, tend to > >>take the easy way out (read: quoting verse). And, while they are at > >>it, they see fit to put people down. And who do they put down? Their > >>USERS!!! Well, duh! Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. > >> > >>I've done my share of OSS, so it really bugs me to be preached at and > >>put down. > >> > >>Let's take the current thread. Gaim has "principles" (who made those > >>principles anyway?) and violating those principles is a bad thing. > >>Introducing these poor gui designs would really hurt gaim. Giving the > >>user too many preferences is bad. Etc. > >> > >>Well... has anyone ever taken a look at the gaim preferences panel? > >>It's called create a panel and throw stuff into it ad hoc. Look at > >>the fonts panel. I still can't figure out what it is for. > >> > >>Whatever, my point is not to pick on gaim - I've used it for years and > >>really like it despite it's quirks. Which brings us back to the whole > >>point of this thread. I want to use gaim on the crappy win32 platform > >>I'm stuck with at work and I can't without a lot of interference from > >>these tooltips. > >> > >>Unfortunately, I'm at a point in my life/career where it is difficult > >>to contribute so I come to this list asking for help. > >> > >>We've already probably spent more time than it would have taken to > >>implement the freakin' preference. Can we just do it? > >> > >>Thanks... > >> > >></flame> > >> > >>/greg > >> > >> > >>-- > >>Gregory F. March -=- http://www.gfm.net:81/~march -=- > >>AIM:GfmNet > >> > >> |