[CREATE] LGM 2010 Website

[Christoph Schäfer]

Hi,

Wow, that's a lot of stuff deal with :)

Am Samstag, 3. Oktober 2009 06:27:51 schrieb Yuval Levy:
> Jan Claeys wrote:
> > What about s/Libre/Liberation/ or s/Libre/Liberty/ ?
>
> honestly and directly: the concept of Freedom (and it does not matter
> what synonyms are being used) is overloaded, overburdened, and IMO far
> from central to what our tools are and do.

This may be nitpicking, but in a sense it _is_ important, because without the 
concept of freedom, many, if not most, tools wouldn't exist or evolve at all.

<snip>
>
> They don't see Freedom as we do. To them, dealing with the source code
> is actually a burden. They rather be free from it than free to do it.
> They prefer freeware to Free software. As much as we love to lift the
> car's hood and fiddle with the motor, they dread it. And I am not
> interested preaching Freedom to them.

Freedom may not be the major "selling" point from a marketing point of view, 
and there's no reason to "preach" its values. What's more important, though, 
at least in my opinion, is the attitude of some developers, which comes down 
to: "You don't like something or desperately need a feature? Well, here's the 
Free code, go and do it yourself." This is a safe way to turn users, 
especially professionals, away from Free software, because they have better 
things to do. And no, we cannot compare creative professionals to IT 
professionals, since the latter are expected to have programming experience, 
while the former are not.

> > Or use "CLS" for "Creativity Liberation Suite"...  ;-)
> > (It liberates your creativity in both artistic & philosophical ways!)
>
> I don't need to have my creativity "liberated". neither artistically nor
> philosophically.

Jan's original point was the idea of a Free alternative to Adobe's CS Suite. 
While this idea may be tempting, I don't see any reasonable way to achieve 
this any time soon. First, FLOSS graphics projects "suffer" from the use of 
different UI toolkits, like GTK+ or Qt. The problems arising out of this can 
be worked around on the Linux/BSD desktop (at least for the major distros), 
but on Windows, OS X or even eComStation, all bets are off. And of course I 
expect some people to step up right here and claim that people shouldn't use 
these platforms, while in reality they do and also don't care about 
statements that operating system xyz or desktop abc sucks. It's what they 
have and are used to.

A temporary alternative could be a specialised Linux Live-CD, which would also 
offer an easy way to install the system, so that interested users (including 
professionals) can evaluate what our projects have in store for them. But 
this can't be done overnight and needs a lot of work, especially regarding 
the little details.

Another critical remark directed towards our community is the reaction of some 
people when it comes to comparisons between Open Source software and Closed 
Source solutions. There seems to be a mindset that reflexively rejects any 
notion that companies like Adobe or Corel did anything right or had good 
ideas -- ever. Just mention a useful feature in a piece of Closed Source 
software that should be available in one of our projects and expect to be 
flamed, because these corporations can't get anything right (what are these 
corporate drones and their defrauded users compared to an omniscient 
developer who claims to know how people _should_ use their computers?)

Add to the hypocrisy that many of our projects are only too happy to use 
standards like PostScript, PDF or XMP, originally developed by a corporation 
like Adobe, which, according to some, can't get anything right.

OK, end of rant, exaggeration and sarcasm mode. 

<snip>
>
> Activism is uninteresting. It is time to mature beyond it.

Activism, if understood as ideological crusade, will probably go nowhere, but 
if it means promoting our alternatives (including their idealistic virtues), 
it makes sense.

>
> > You might want to set up some sort of a brainstorm session during LGM
> > 2010 about this...
>
> I don't think that a formal conference session in more than half year is
> required to spin some thoughts and give some feedback. We're not in the
> corporate world, or are we?
>
> I am shocked at the apathy *here* on this mailing list.

You must be new here (joke, joke).

>
> Alexandre Leray has proposed a beautiful website for LGM2010 [0]. It
> introduces some radical design changes. I can't believe that only four
> people have an opinion about it. Is the silent majority just approving?
> or is it shell-shocked? How should we know?

OK, I'm guilty as anybody else here. My opinion: The new logo and the new font 
choice are fabulous and send a strong message (strong in contrast to the 
former playful design). I only wish the final website had more graphical 
elements and perhaps less text.

>
> Alessandro Rimoldi has come up with a sensible proposal [1] to discuss,
> think in more detail, and codify a common graphic aspect for our
> projects. This should IMO also trigger some introspection and
> questioning about our purpose. It's nice to meet once a year, tap on
> each other's shoulder when showing / seeing the latest and greatest
> technical (and a few artistic) achievements of the year. And then?
> lethargy for the rest of the year? everybody on his own?

Things being what they are, there is actually a constant flow of information 
between most projects, albeit most of the time in the respective IRC channels 
or mailing lists (Oh, and I can't remember having met you in the #create 
channel ;)  )

And since the Create Wiki seems to be the homepage of the project, I'd say it 
is in desperate need of an overhaul (and to be honest, we'd rather need a 
decent and visually appealing website for Create, independent of the Wiki).

Cheers,

Christoph