hey, remember the platform?

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Friday 01 July 2005 01:29, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> To some extent I see this argument, but also when Aaron and others say
> this I find myself thinking "OK, so some people say stupid stuff; just
> tell them they are stupid and roll on" ;-)
>
> Basically I don't think we should base decisions on the opinions of
> random bystanders.

FD.o is an attempt to bring some order to the land of babel that is the open 
source desktop through mutual cooperation and intiatives, no? if so, then 
popular acceptence, at least throughout the development community, is an 
absolute minimum requirement.

as such, it's failing miserably at that. there is confusion as to the purpose 
of FD.o, how this "platform" this works and what it is supposed to be made up 
of and the relationship between FD.o and $role (where $role is in the set of 
{ user, ISV, 3rd party OSS developer, central project })

if people don't know what FD.o is for, how it works and what the heck is 
supposed to be a part of it, FD.o well be for naught in the long term. i 
don't see FD.o being useful as a closed circle "old boys club" style 
organization, but i do see its agenda being distorted in the public eye by 
those who have other ideas for it.

there's more to life than the core developers, and public perception most 
certainly does shape and affect matters of adoption and support all the way 
from 3rd party developers to final deployments.

and who really are we putting this platform together for? the people in KDE, 
GNOME, OOo, Moz, etc.. all know what we use. this isn't nearly so much for us 
as it is those we are trying to work with: vendors, ISVs and other third 
parties.

so to shrug off FD.o's abismally poor public communications efforts as not 
particularly important is short sighted. as you know (since i've publicly 
stated it a few times now ;), i believe FD.o is currently on the tracks to 
underachievement.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43
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