[maemo-users] Diablo's Modest/Email

[From: Dave Neary]

Hi,

Mark wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 3:11 PM, Theodore Tso <tytso at mit.edu> wrote:
>> If there's something you want that isn't yet implemented in
>> open source, either implement it yourself, or gently request that
>> someone who can implement do so --- or perhaps you can hire them or
>> otherwise give them some kind of incentive to implement the feature
>> for you.  Open source developers do *not* owe anything to their user
>> base; they implement feature requests out of the goodness of their
>> hearts, or because they need the feature as well.
> 
> In other words, f*** off! This is exactly the attitude that will
> always keep open source from gaining significant market share. Only
> the projects that actually listen to such concerns ever make any real
> impact (Mozilla, anyone?).

What is absolutely true of all software, is that if you want a feature
which is not in the software you want to use, your options are to
persuade the maintainers to add it, or switch to other software which
already has the feature.

Free software gives you two additional possibilities: do it yourself, or
pay someone else to do it for you.

With commercial software the "I'm paying money for this software"
argument carries some (but not much, in my experience) weight with the
maintainers, which it obviously doesn't with Free Software. "I'm paying
your wages" is also a strong argument.


If, as you say, this is really basic functionality, required or desired
by a substantial portion of the user base, then you shouldn't have any
trouble convincing the maintainers. If, on the other hand, it's a
marginal feature that few people use, you might have a harder time.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
maemo.org docsmaster
Email: dneary at maemo.org
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