[maemo-users] gpe contacts import

[From: Jonathan Markevich]

On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 1:25 PM, Eero Tamminen <eero.tamminen at nokia.com>
wrote:

>
> Talking again about open source & personal point of view, NOT about
> commercial software or products (such as Nokia device...).
>

If OSS doesn't view itself as professional as commercial stuff, then it's
guaranteed to fail in the long run.   Look at the success stories of OSS;
Firefox, Apache, Linux, OOo, and so on.  They aren't based around the
bitterness of a developer in a basement.

Submitting a bugzilla report shouldn't take more than 10 minutes
>>
>
> 10 minutes is a long time for something that may not help.  Multiply that
> by
> say 8-10 open source applications you are interested in, and you see why
> it's not worth the effort.
>

10*10 minutes is still <2 hours.  And you've then participated in
> helping 10 different projects to (potentially) improve!
>

Who has 2 hours to waste on something as fun as bugzilla?  Even this email
exchange is way more rewarding.  I've put in a handful for certain projects,
then watch them sit around doing nothing, only to get an email that says
"WONTFIX".  That's user hostile.


> a difference).  Have you ever got the "Report this error to Microsoft"
>> dialog box?  That's what I'm talking about.
>>
>
> It's fairly similar to Ubuntu apport I think?  Ubuntu's lacking
> MS problem & solution database.  Novell/SUSE has something similar
> to that though I think.
>
> However, those are distributions, not individual upstream projects
> like's discussed here.
>
> (Hm... Maybe maemo, as a basis for distribution could offer something
> here.)
>

NOW you're talking!  I'm trying to promote the "many eyeballs" thing and not
the "genius with a microscope" thing.

 If you go to effort of reporting the bug and actually reply questions
>> on how the developers might be able to reproduce it, so that they
>> can start investigating how to fix it, that shows that you actually
>> care about the issue and that it's real.
>>
>>
> So you say we have thousands of users per developer.  Great!  The user
> should be able to email or whatever saying:  xyz is crashing when I view
> the
> records.  It means almost nothing to the dev, but if he gets 999 others
> that
> say exactly the same thing, it means the view records routine is horribly
> broken.
>

Usually it means that users are using too old version of the SW
> (e.g. because distro hasn't upgraded to latest version) and therefore
> wasting developers time.
>
>  On the other hand, if he gets 5 others, and notices they're all
>> from non-latin alphabet countries, the dev is in the best position to put
>> those pieces together.  The DEV can make a bugzilla record.  Maybe in
>>
>> Instead what usually happens is the instant any individual report comes in
>> the dev starts shouting about how the user should use bugzilla (yet
>> another
>> application, another big learning curve, and yet another registration on
>> the
>> net), expecting every user to be a developer or professional-grade QA
>> tester
>> too.
>>
>> That makes the triage for the user easy; 3) dump the program.
>>
>
> Regardless of how important you may feel yourself :-), most Open Source
>

This is not about my own perceived importance, but the developer's.  Is he
really more valuable than thousands or hundreds of users?


> developers really aren't doing what they do to please you or get more
> users, but to solve the issues they have themselves or otherwise find
> interesting/fun to solve.  Having more users is nice only if they help
> in that, otherwise they are just a drag.  As it's possible that users at
> some later point become contributors, and it's nice to hear that your
> efforts are appreciated by others, Open Source developers are usually
> nice for the users (if they behave reasonably).
>

Again, this is a very unprofessional way to develop.  Self-defeating.  Might
as well keep it closed source at this point.  And makes the platform
unattractive to users and investors (I also mean investors of mindshare and
time as well as money)

However, Open Source is about a community of people who want to improve
> things *together*.  If you just want to profit from their work without
> contributing yourself in someway (even to some other project), well,
> they're not going to miss you.
>

Do you say the same thing to developers?  "If you don't want to respond to
users' input, take a hike, we're not going to miss you".

The best experiences I've had with developers on maemo so far is on the ITT
forums.  It's simple to report, you can see results, and takes only
seconds.  One registration for many many applications, and it's something
you might want to do in the long run anyway.
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