From kde-devel Tue Jun 10 11:07:52 2008 From: "Benjamin Reed" Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 11:07:52 +0000 To: kde-devel Subject: Re: Fork of KDE4/Qt3? Message-Id: <57eba2250806100407r6bfbfbc9p3f0e91b4f6e11ee5 () mail ! gmail ! com> X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-devel&m=121309615327667 On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 5:42 AM, Mark A. Taff wrote: > Last I checked, I'm not the one bullying other contributors. You are welcome > to ignore Aaron's bullying if you like. But please explain to me why I > should stand by and permit Aaron to insult and degrade contributors, whether > myself or others? How many potential developers, translators, doc writers, > artists, have decided not to help because they don't want to get treated like > a toilet by Aaron? I guess I missed all of those times he did so, but I certainly didn't miss all of the times Aaron has been more than patient with someone who *starts* their part of the conversation with: > Here's a real suggestion: give us back our Desktops! > > The consequences of current plasma are that the masses for whom the exisiting > Desktop metaphor is highly effective are being told by the deeds of the > Plasma developers to take long walk off a short pier. ...while they continue to shit on him. If you can show me what part of that original post from you was constructive, I would appreciate it. All I see is hindsight saying "you should have reimplemented kicker and kdesktop first!" when at the time, there was a huge huge HUGE discussion about it and the decision was made that the benefits of plasma outweighed the amount of time it would take making those two legacy technologies not suck on qt4. I remember the discussions, and it was not some kind of unilateral decision from the plasma team. For a while, there was doubt, and there were still people doing what they could to make kicker et al work, and it was a bloody mess. In the end, plasma shaped up to do all of the important things a user needed, albeit in a somewhat different way, but since KDE4 was *designed* to sit alongside KDE3, people who really really wanted the Old Way could still have it without explosions, other than emotional ones, apparently. The way open source works is: if someone wants a feature badly enough, they chip in to help make it happen. Out of all of the people who have worked on implementing cool widgets and stuff in plasma, no one has bothered mimicking the things you say are "required" for a desktop to work. Not to say no one thought "hmm, maybe we should do this..." but the new features of plasma won, because they liked them better, and there are thousands of users who disagree that KDE is useless in it's current form. But... It's open source and if you think something should be different, you have every right to pip up. However, complaining on a developer list without contributing anything other than "your decisions suck, I have declared you should work on other things" is the exact best way to make sure people have no desire to work on those things. To paraphrase an open-source mantra, scratch your own itch, and put up or shut up. You can say you're trying to open the discourse and expose injustice all you want, but you have a horrible way of finding allies. Next time, try not insulting the motives of an open-source programmer -- even if directed at Aaron, that tack basically insults everyone here, who is donating their time to free software, working on things that make the software better for themselves and for you. > People laugh about Steve Ballmer losing his temper and throwing chairs, but > nobody seems to mind when Aaron hurls personal attacks? While I agree it's too bad it degenerated to this, what exactly is the response you expect to the stones you cast? >> Just, pretty please, stop. Thank you. > >> Have a nice day. >> Gaël Best thing said on this thread so far. I'm still angry, and I know I'll want to respond again, but I'm not going to post anymore. The best thing we can all do is have a nice day. -- Benjamin Reed a.k.a. Ranger Rick Fink, KDE, and Mac OS X development Blog: http://www.raccoonfink.com/ Music: http://music.raccoonfink.com/ >> Visit http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-devel#unsub to unsubscribe <<