Re: communication

On Sun, Mar 23, 2003 at 04:36:17PM -0500, David Dawes wrote: 
> It could be because we as volunteers keep getting people (and
> companies) telling us what we should do.  Actually, "pressuring"
> would be more accurate. 

I honestly don't think XFree86 is exceptional in this respect.

What is perhaps exceptional is that you're the layer sandwiched
between GNOME and KDE, and the Linux kernel, and both of those layers
are much larger developer communities than XFree86 seems to be.  So
there's a high ratio of "outsiders" that have a strong interest,
vs. "insiders."

In my opinion, the right solution to this is for XFree86 to grow in
number of developers, perhaps in part by sucking in people from the
surrounding layers. How to grow is the hard question of course. ;-)

> Since you mention the bugzilla example,
> by far the largest pressure for that came from the likes of Red
> Hat, not from the developers who will have to use it.  I don't see
> why a response like "if you want it so badly, why don't you do
> something to make it happen" is unreasonable. 

FWIW, I don't think anyone from Red Hat is asking for things on behalf
of Red Hat. Or even asking for things period. There is a difference
between "you should do this for us" and "you should do this because
it's the right thing to do and it's been demonstrated to work."

Please don't ignore suggestions from some of the most experienced,
smartest people in free software like Alan Cox and Owen, because they
mail from @redhat.com. Of course nobody has all the answers but the
datapoints are worth taking seriously.

Havoc