[Tikiwiki-devel] Re: Internal content linking?

[Dennis H. <dhe...@ad...>]

David R. Newman wrote:
> Actually, that was an early discussion. The relevant thread is
> the one on "Combining writing modes (was: Have fun)". I was
> arguing for a perfectionist redesign, Paul-V Khuong and Luis
> were suggesting immediate fixes and workarounds.

I remember that. Your ideas for redesign were great, but no one with the 
time and expertise to do the rewrite stepped forward. This happens quite 
often with Tiki (and, I suppose, all OSS projects) -- great ideas are 
put forward and everyone pretty much agrees it would be nice, but there 
is disagreement about how {important|worthwhile} the 
{feature|redesign|project} is and so nothing actually happens, often the 
suggesters get disillusioned and leave the Tiki community and go 
somewhere else to make similar suggestions (where the are also ignored, 
leaving them bitter, hollow people after a few rounds).

This is both the genius and major drawback of OSS, suggestions are 
heard, but often not accepted due to lack of interest or resources. In 
the commercial world, you can pay the vendor to implement your 
requirement, and that can work pretty well in OSS as well, but unlike 
commercial software, we (the suggestors) believe we are doing the 
community a favor with our suggestion. And we are, it just that if we 
did the same thing with our commercial software vendor, they would just 
laugh. Imagine going to a vendor we pay $10K/year for a license and 
telling them what we need to make it function better for us and 
explaining that it will make it more attractive to other buyers. Will 
they do it for free? Maybe, but it's not really free, because you are 
paying $10K for them to keep you happy each year. What if you told them 
this was such a great idea that you'd like to stop paying them and 
rather help them test the new functionality.

I like to make suggestions for other to implement also, but in the end, 
not much gets done unless I do it. Fortunately, the ideas others have 
and implement are usually a big benefit for me also, and make my own 
efforts easier. That's the benefit of Tiki.

Dennis