hey, remember the platform?

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Friday 01 July 2005 03:45, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-07-01 at 14:38 -0600, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> I'd much rather discuss whether you or Waldo or whoever thinks something
> is _right_ than whether you think there are people that will get all
> whiny about it.

i'm not concerned about /. people. i'm concerned about other developers, be 
they KDE project members, third party developers or ISVs.

i regularly explain what FD.o is for or what the platform is for to these 
people; it's a regular excercise for me. they don't grok what's happening 
here, and they are precisely the ones we need to be groking it.

on the other side of that fence, i've also listened to people from other 
projects who are very excited about FD.o go on about things that FD.o is 
completely not about. e.g. creating standards to push other projects to adopt 
them.

the important realization here is that the FD.o vision is not being 
communicated to the target audiences.

and btw, i really don't like being an ad hoc articulater of these concepts 
because other than my occasional input here and my intense desire to see this 
process work, i do not represent any sort of vision creation or leadership 
within fd.o.

> > 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.
>
> Here is my basic view.
>
>  1. freedesktop.org works the same way as most other open source
>     projects:

fd.o is not most other open source projects. most other open source projects 
are scope-limited and concentrated on a product that is encapsulated within 
it's boundaries of human endeavour. most other open source projects acrete 
community around the core products, rather than acrete core products around 
communities. fd.o is a _new type_ of project compared to the KDEs, GNOMEs, 
Sambas and Linuxes of the world.

>  2. it's just not that complicated and not that scary

heh.. i agree with both points. simple and friendly things don't immediately 
mean success however.

> I'm not doing a lot on freedesktop.org (or any coding at all these
> days), so I can't do a ton of stuff to address concerns - like rewording

hm... how many people ARE working on fd.o direction issues? is this one of the 
wellheads of problems here? complete anarchy with no caretakers? if so, can 
we convince some of the players out there in the industry to take fd.o a bit 
more seriously and task some talent on this?

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/platform/attachments/20050702/54d6614f/attachment.pgp