Re: The <whatever> developer syndrome

In article <[email protected]>, James Richard Tyrer wrote:
> Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
>> 
>> you've never known a professional who had fun doing what they did? to me fun 
>> is not a swear word, nor the epitome of waste; it is (for me) a necessary 
>> part of a sane life and the true creative experience. it may be otherwise to 
>> you, and that's totally fine (not that it requires my permission, of 
>> course ;). i would not demand that you have fun; i also desire for you to not 
>> request that i relinquish my enjoyment so as to make *my* experience fit 
>> *your* expectations. furthermore, my path (with which you may disagree with) 
>> may end up leading to the exact destination you are striving for (and vice 
>> versa). 
>> 
>> there is more than your one answer to the question of life.
>> 
> Remember, this isn't about having fun.  It is about doing things which are 
> not fun.  Not fixing the bugs because it isn't fun is an armature attitude.

In the Open Source world, there are three answers to the problem of
developers not doing what you want:

- join them and contribute to the areas that are important to you
- fork
- create a derivative work (subset or superset)

Before the 3rd option sounds too radical, consider that it is exactly
what all the Linux distributions do.

If someone wants to create e.g. a context-menu free version of KDE,
or a KDE that has only a single media player and single text editor,
and adds other apps like Scribus, the code is there for the taking.

In any case I don't think it's worth getting worked up over how
developers may or may not respond to feedback.  Individual feedback
to Open Source projects still has a much better chance of having
an effect than it does with commercial closed source products.  And
if that's not good enough, hey, you have the code.  Seriously.

Steve



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