Re: communication

On Sun, Mar 23, 2003 at 05:00:20PM -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 23, 2003 at 07:06:54PM +0000, Alan Hourihane wrote: 
> > I will say this. You definately seem to be making demands on an Open
> > Source project for someone to listen to your requirements. That's
> > not unreasonable, but it is unreasonable for you to want someone else
> > to code up the things you deem as needed for your own purposes for
> > the desktop your striving to produce.
> 
> Here is how I think about the obligations of project maintainers.  (I
> maintain gconf, metacity, libwnck, pkg-config,
> libstartup-notification, gnome-terminal, assorted applets,
> desktop-file-utils, some chunks of gtk, freedesktop.org, and some
> too-new-or-too-old-to-mention other stuff, if you're wondering.)
> 
> There is value in having free software codebases that are a community
> resource. The maintainer of a community resource has certain
> responsibilities - in October 2002 I wrote
> http://ometer.com/features.html (unrelated to XFree86) which happens
> to mention a couple at the end, just as examples.
> 
> Now, say I write a codebase that does XYZ. It is very much in my
> rights to say "this is not a community resource, go away" and do
> whatever I want whenever I want. However, if I'm going to say that,
> then I can't complain if someone creates a functionally equivalent
> codebase that *is* a community resource.
> 
> If I'm asserting that my codebase is the community resource - which is
> implicit in complaining about forks - then the codebase is expected to
> be maintained in the community interest, not in "whatever I feel like
> doing" mode. (I am speaking in general terms here, not trying to 
> imply anything about the XFree86 situation.)
> 
> What is "the community interest"? It depends on how you define your
> community. If you say, as GNOME has, that the goal of the project is
> to satisfy average desktop users and not hackers, then our community
> interest is those average desktop users. We can complain if someone
> forks GNOME to do another project for average desktop users. But if
> someone forks GNOME to make a cool hacker desktop with featuritis, we
> have absolutely no basis to complain, because we refused to do that
> ourselves. They are pursuing a different community interest.
> 
> So - I don't think Owen or anyone else is making demands on XFree86 to
> implement features. I think the implicit issue in this whole
> discussion is: what community interests does XFree86 include. Which
> goals are you the "owners" of. Because we (we = the whole free
> software community) need to know this, just for planning
> purposes. Which maintainer obligations does XFree86 accept, and which
> do we need to find other people to cover.
> 
> If XFree86 covers the community interest "Foo," then we (entire free
> software community) have a right to expect XFree86 to make certain
> efforts in that area. XFree86 "owns" that area and has
> responsibilities there to do certain maintainer duties, or step aside
> and let someone else do them. If XFree86 does not cover "Foo," then
> XFree86 has every right to say "screw off, do that yourself" - but the
> community also has every right to in fact do it themselves. ;-)
> 
> In short, maintainers have an obligation not to complain about forks
> anytime they stand in the way. Standing in the way can be active ("no,
> I won't take patches for that") and also inactive ("I don't have time
> to review patches/discuss this issue/whatever").
> 
> As a maintainer, sometimes I stand in the way on purpose, and
> sometimes because I don't have time, but either way I have to say
> "sure, go nuts with your fork that addresses your problem." For
> example that http://ometer.com/features.html page was written because
> I frequently answer metacity feature requests with "no way in hell" -
> but implicit in that is, if you want to fork metacity to add that
> feature, I wish you all the best of luck. Just rename the binary so I
> don't get the bugs. ;-)
> 
> 
> In any case, back to your mail. Is it unreasonable to expect XFree86
> to *implement* a feature that I or Owen or KDE or Red Hat or IBM would
> like to see? Absolutely, that is an absurd demand.
 
Right. I'm glad we agree here.

> Is it unreasonable to expect XFree86 to do the basic maintenance
> duties that would *allow* someone to implement the feature?  Not in my
> opinion.
 
Exactly. So to take this furthur, you could be your own maintenance
engineer if the patches you submit show that you really know what your
doing in this field. I'd like to encourage that !

Alan.