A common VFS and a Common conf-system [Part II]

[Philip Van Hoof]

On Wed, 2005-03-02 at 01:52 +0100, Philip Van Hoof wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-03-01 at 19:20 -0500, Sean Middleditch wrote:

> Any single such problem can cause a maintainer of a larger core desktop
> application to decide not to start using this new vfs-layer. Which will
> in turn infect many other maintainers. Which will void any effort going
> into building and designing this vfs. Let's all agree thats not what we
> want, right? We'll need a great acceptance from the most difficult kind
> of species on this earth: developers. Not "just" acceptance.

And don't forget that the freedesktop organisation doesn't have the
money to spoil developers with "Microsoft DevDays"-like events where
they'll get good food and lots of gadgets and "new Microsoft
technology"-related dolls and puppets. Nor "Channel 9 anti-stress"-dolls
and whatever I've seen so far.

This organisation probably can't make a developer think he'll get more
money if he incorporates some new fancy technology. Microsoft marketing
teams can make developers think like that. Oh and I can assure you they
are actually succeeding. "You'll develop more using less development
time with Visual Studio .NET bla bla".

The point I'm trying to make is: Freedesktop.org can't (yet). Well,
perhaps some developers might get influenced, but I assure you most free
software won't.

So this organisation will have to market this much more on a technical
and ideological basis. Luckily lots of free software developers are
smart enough to look further than marketing bullshit.

It's rather hard to explain somebody that by replacing a technology
thats already working and doing exactly what it's suppose to do (Kio or
Gnome-Vfs), he'll get more productive or will gain some major benefits.

I can also assure you a lot developers don't yet care about "cross
desktop". They like the freedesktop.org initiative, yeah of course. But
wait until you ask them to do some major changes to the applications
they are maintaining at this moment.

I'm much more worried about acceptance than I am about the technical
details of this new vfs. Eventually we'll also need to sell this new
system somehow. And the developers will need to swallow it.



-- 
Philip Van Hoof, Software Developer @ Cronos
home: me at freax dot org
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org
work: philip dot vanhoof at cronos dot be
junk: philip dot vanhoof at gmail dot com
http://www.freax.be, http://www.freax.eu.org