On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 1:25 PM, Eero Tamminen <<a href="mailto:eero.tamminen@nokia.com">eero.tamminen@nokia.com</a>> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<br>
Talking again about open source & personal point of view, NOT about<br>
commercial software or products (such as Nokia device...).<div class="Ih2E3d"></div></blockquote><div class="Ih2E3d"><br>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.<br>
<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Submitting a bugzilla report shouldn't take more than 10 minutes<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
10 minutes is a long time for something that may not help. Multiply that by<br>
say 8-10 open source applications you are interested in, and you see why<br>
it's not worth the effort.<br>
</blockquote>
<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
10*10 minutes is still <2 hours. And you've then participated in<br>
helping 10 different projects to (potentially) improve!<br>
</blockquote><div><br>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.<br>
</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div class="Ih2E3d"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
a difference). Have you ever got the "Report this error to Microsoft"<br>
dialog box? That's what I'm talking about.<br>
</blockquote>
<br></div>
It's fairly similar to Ubuntu apport I think? Ubuntu's lacking<br>
MS problem & solution database. Novell/SUSE has something similar<br>
to that though I think.<br>
<br>
However, those are distributions, not individual upstream projects<br>
like's discussed here.<br>
<br>
(Hm... Maybe maemo, as a basis for distribution could offer something here.)<div class="Ih2E3d"></div></blockquote><div class="Ih2E3d"><br>NOW you're talking! I'm trying to promote the "many eyeballs" thing and not the "genius with a microscope" thing.<br>
<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
If you go to effort of reporting the bug and actually reply questions<br>
on how the developers might be able to reproduce it, so that they<br>
can start investigating how to fix it, that shows that you actually<br>
care about the issue and that it's real.<br>
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
So you say we have thousands of users per developer. Great! The user<br>
should be able to email or whatever saying: xyz is crashing when I view the<br>
records. It means almost nothing to the dev, but if he gets 999 others that<br>
say exactly the same thing, it means the view records routine is horribly<br>
broken.<br>
</blockquote>
<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Usually it means that users are using too old version of the SW<br>
(e.g. because distro hasn't upgraded to latest version) and therefore<br>
wasting developers time.<br><div class="Ih2E3d">
<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
On the other hand, if he gets 5 others, and notices they're all<br>
from non-latin alphabet countries, the dev is in the best position to put<br>
those pieces together. The DEV can make a bugzilla record. Maybe in<br><br>
Instead what usually happens is the instant any individual report comes in<br>
the dev starts shouting about how the user should use bugzilla (yet another<br>
application, another big learning curve, and yet another registration on the<br>
net), expecting every user to be a developer or professional-grade QA tester<br>
too.<br>
<br>
That makes the triage for the user easy; 3) dump the program.<br>
</blockquote>
<br></div>
Regardless of how important you may feel yourself :-), most Open Source<br></blockquote><div><br>This is not about my own perceived importance, but the developer's. Is he really more valuable than thousands or hundreds of users?<br>
</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
developers really aren't doing what they do to please you or get more<br>
users, but to solve the issues they have themselves or otherwise find<br>
interesting/fun to solve. Having more users is nice only if they help<br>
in that, otherwise they are just a drag. As it's possible that users at<br>
some later point become contributors, and it's nice to hear that your<br>
efforts are appreciated by others, Open Source developers are usually<br>
nice for the users (if they behave reasonably).<br>
</blockquote><div><br>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)<br>
<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
However, Open Source is about a community of people who want to improve<br>
things *together*. If you just want to profit from their work without<br>
contributing yourself in someway (even to some other project), well,<br>
they're not going to miss you.<br>
</blockquote><div><br>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".<br><br>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.<br>
</div></div>