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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Fork of KDE4/Qt3?
From:       "Benjamin Reed" <rangerrick () gmail ! com>
Date:       2008-06-10 11:07:52
Message-ID: 57eba2250806100407r6bfbfbc9p3f0e91b4f6e11ee5 () mail ! gmail ! com
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On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 5:42 AM, Mark A. Taff <marktaff@comcast.net> 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/
 
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