[Clipart] Understanding what "Open" means

[Bryce Harrington]

I haven't been following the thread too closely, but the subject caught
my eye, and I notice some tension over disagreements.  The discussions
on the list need to be kept civil, so that the project remains friendly
and accessible for new developers.

For folks new to the project, we do have some general ground rules, most
of which we've adopted from Inkscape.  In addition to keeping the
general discourse friendly, we also have a "pick up a shovel" philosophy
that I think Jon mentioned the other day; basically this means that
having ideas or critique is okay, but the project is organized around
contributions, thus implementing the idea as a patch, or providing the
code to fix something you see as a bug, is the best way of getting it
accepted.

In general, the issues the project faces are less about having the
"correct" or "best" ideas, but simply the time resources to implement
them.  Thus, ideas that are presented in the form of a patch, script, or
document will be the ideal (since there's less work to do to implement
it.)

Anyway, I mention this because it's possible taht too much is getting
hashed around on the list.  While of course it can be useful to argue
out ideas on a list, in my experience this often can lead to
disagreements, frustrations, and irritation between the participants.
It is much more productive in my eyes to channel those energies into
implementing those ideas.  An implementation doesn't guarantee it'll be
accepted, but as they say, the devil's in the details so if you've got
the details sorted out, we can spend less time in hell to start making
use of it.  ;-)

Civility is very important to this long term success of this project,
and one of the few rules we all have to demand of ourselves.  If you
think a discussion is getting too heated, take it offline or set it
aside until the next day.  And like I mentioned above, look and see if
the matter really needs to be worked out in code, and if so, fire up a
text editor and have at it.

Bryce