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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Allow money donations for precise bugs
From:       Mathias Homann <Mathias.Homann () eregion ! de>
Date:       2005-03-13 23:34:24
Message-ID: 200503140034.25982.Mathias.Homann () eregion ! de
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Am Sonntag, 13. März 2005 23:54 schrieb Waldo Bastian:

> Yes, if you flame you have to do it right. I wasn't aware there was
> a discussion going on actually. I just found this thread an amusing
> way to spend my free sunday afternoon, it was either amusing myself
> in this thread or doing some bug reports. But I guess my attempt at
> improving my personal insult skills wasn't as funny as I thought, I
> admit to having a strange kind of humor, so I would like to
> apologize for that to you and your family.

ok, i'll happily forget about that business with the goat ;)

> > who was that again, suse?
>
> Well, it's good that you mention my employer. My employer actually
> cares about its paying (!) customers. 

well, if you imply that i did not buy the suse which i run on several 
computers, i could send you pictures of all the suse boxes i have 
somewhere over there *points at shelf* ;) but that's beyond the scope 
of kde-devel ;)

> And when my employer gets the 
> impression that a significant part of its paying customers would
> like to have a certain feature, it will direct paid developers
> (like me) to implement those features. It does that in the hope to
> get that investment repaid in the form of increased product sales.

too bad that suse (note that i assume that you still work for them and 
not for someone else, based on an interview on kde-people which is a 
few years old by now) doesnt check the votes for the wishlist entry 
which i was orginally referring to...

anyhow, i had the impression that assigning a bug/wish to a certain 
developer means that that person HAS to do it in a certain timeframe 
unless he's too busy with more important stuff...

> Note the difference here between a commercial linux vendor, for
> whom paying customers are essential to its business and whose
> primary goal is to make profit, and an open source project, which
> has no profit motive whatsoever, does not have paying customers and
> has only a small amount of financial expenses.
>
> > which DE is default on suse linux?
>
> You can chose between Gnome and KDE as default :-)

nah, i dont like gnome ;) last time i checked, the only app onyl 
existing for gnome that i'd really use kept telling me "feature not 
implemented" whenever i tried to do more than just start it...
besides, gtk apps are ugly.

> > So, if some people here oppose to paying for features, shouldnt
> > the same people see that this bugzilla item gets assigned to
> > someone else?
>
> Those same people just don't care for the feature.

given the fact that you cannot vote higher than 20 for any given bug 
or feature on the kde bugzilla, at least 200 people DO care for that 
specific one, it has 2150 votes.
So, here's the point again: it seems that some developers do not care 
about other opinions about features/bugs than their own. which makes 
giving feedback a bit of a moot point...

> You seem to care, you have the ability to pay the kmail developer to
> get it  done, yet you don't do so.

who said that? I never said that i wouldnt want to pay for a 
feature... But i would really like to be SURE that it gets 
implemented in a reasonable time frame, before i donate whatever i 
can spare (which is not that much). Besides, there are some cases 
where i noticed that the fact that any given bug or feature is marked 
as "fixed" ("implemented", respectively) in the kde bugzilla, does 
not mean that this feature appears in the next released KDE... 

> If anything, it proves that this whole 
> idea of "let's buy features with symbolic amounts of money", just
> doesn't work.

that could be true.

> Unfortunately a lot of people, including you, aren't 
> willing to accept that reality because they keep holding the
> mistaken believe that they have a right to demand that others write
> software for them for an amount far below fair market value. You
> don't have that right and it is extremely rude to think you do.

I think you got me wrong here. I do understand that most of you KDE 
guys do "it" for the fun of it; I've done so myself. I would even try 
my hand at implementing said "strip attachments from stored mails" 
myself, but I'm not good enough at reading & understanding other 
peoples code, even if I'm capable enough to code my own stuff (and 
have in fact been doing so since the mid 80ies).

> I understand where the confusion comes from though. On hand it
> comes from all round confusion about the term "free software" which
> people keep associating with "free beer", this isn't surprising
> because "free software" often comes as "free beer". It doesn't stop
> with that though, the harmfull part starts when people get the
> "free beer" and then think because the beer is free, they must
> certainly have a right to "free whiskey", "free wine" and "free
> spareribs" as well, and please hurry a bit because they don't want
> to wait all day. And sure, they understand that the whiskey costs
> 30 EUR a bottle in the shop, so here you have a 50ct tip and now
> better hurry because they paid for it. As I hope you realize by
> now, that's not how the free software cafe operates.

as i already said, i do know that point.
MY point is, that more often than not, it _FEELS_ like the developers 
happily ignore the feedback they get, for whatever reasons.
I'm the first to accept a "no we dont want to implement that feature 
because of $(insert valid technical reason here)" but getting no 
responses at all on filed bugs||wishes can be quite annoying.

> The other problem is that there are people who are really fed up
> with Microsoft's monopoly and would nothing better than to replace
> it with Linux and free software today. They like that to happen so
> much that they tell everyone that Linux and open source software is
> great and can solve all their problems. And in their enthusiasm
> they may get a little bit overboard and exagerate a little bit.

hm. well. I don't think that it's actually POSSIBLE to exaggerate 
"linux&kde is good" ;)

> Now the problem starts when someone who has been told that Linux can
> solve all his problems, then discovers that he happens to have a
> problem that it can't solve.

that happens with every software on earth...

> He will get all angry because "they" told him it could solve all his
> problems, and then he goes to "kde-devel@kde.org" to complain about
> it

well at least you guys HAVE contact points to the unwashed masses... 
Once i gave myself the special treat of sending feedback to 
microsoft, about the ways outsuck excess behaves on the usenet. Guess 
the rest.

> It's a bit like the fairy tale about the goose that laid 
> golden eggs, you need to keep the goose healthy and happy to
> benefit from the eggs. Throwing euros at it doesn't help if all it
> wants is love and care.

to stick with the picture: its hard to love and care for a goose that 
keeps hissing at you and snapping at your fingers ;)

bye,
	MH

on a totally unrelated sidenote, how do i get my selfmade kde 
screensaver into kde3-extragear or whereever it belongs?


-- 
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