On 26.04.2013 22:25, Canek Peláez Valdés wrote:
[ snip ]
You do realize that Lennart hasn't been the maintainer of PulseAudio
since *BEFORE* the 1.0 release? And that now it has in fact many
contributors, and they just released 3.0 in December and are getting
ready to release 4.0? And that systemd/udev has dozens of
contributors, from (basically) all the distributions, and that several
of them are kernel developers?
Just the same way as Linus is the person of the kernel, and BG is the
person of Microsoft, and Moscow is the capital of Russia (don't you take
literally smth like "Moscow agreed to Washington's terms"), we probably
do not speak of personalities or capitals but there is of course some
connection and responsibility on their behalf.
You may not like the *design* of the stuff, but you certainly can't
complaint about the *quality* of it.
How can quality be apart of design? What do you then mean by quality?
Quality of bytes and indentation and comments?
You are not being forced to anything: in the worst case you can patch
all the programs you use, the code is out there.
Thanks, it really doesn't look like forcing.
On the higher level, there must be some politics going on; that's also
not forcing, but politics. On the lower level (that of users) one's
always got the worst case to demonstrate there's no forcing. But why not
go "the best case"? It's a big mistake to think that developing software
is about writing code; NO! it's about communication. What is your
software usable for except its users' usage? Ask users and try to do
what they want. Forcing begins when you the developer start to think
what users want without asking them, that's why (some) users don't go
the windows way, the mac way or other ways and NOT the quality or design
of windows or mac, nor their cost.
Free doesn't just mean you get it for free -- and as if that should be
the indulgence of the developers; free is (to me) the freedom of
communication between them and the users, it's what is called the
community! (As an example, you may notice what's going on around MySQL,
losing its community; feel free to take the code and patch though, as it
remains GPL'd and free!)
And when I hear
> Do you pay them?
I answer, you need money -- why code then? Go to a stock exchange and
trade, there's quite a bit more money guys. That's what about money.
But if you do your job, please do it with regard to how it is going to
be used. You agreed to the terms; there was no forcing.
This is the line that must be drawn.
(Similarly, when I'd start to pay, do I buy the right for `all my dreams
to come true`? Another fair question would be: do I pay *enough*? Who
pays more?)
It's a neverending talk anyway. Everyone has his own attitude, and
probably most of us are willing to make the world better, only according
to one's own perception of "better".
--
Best wishes,
Yuri K. Shatroff