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List:       quanta
Subject:    Re: [Quanta] encouragement
From:       Eric Laffoon <eric () kdewebdev ! org>
Date:       2008-05-20 17:28:02
Message-ID: 200805201028.03406.eric () kdewebdev ! org
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On Monday 19 May 2008 5:17:47 pm James Ellis wrote:
> Hi Eric
>
> I'll take this as a sideways jab at my questions about Quanta's CPU /
> memory usage. It always amuses/frustrates me when a developer of a product
> gets frustrated when people ask pointy questions of their product. This is
> generally based on an assumption that the user is an idiot for not having
> done what you would have done or not having the same thought patterns as
> you.

The most dangerous error in human interaction is to assume you know what the 
other person is thinking and their motivations. If that were true you would 
be identical and without difference. As human beings we tend to make 
egregious errors wrapped around our fragile egos...

1) A person with more knowledge in a give subject is assumed to either be 
smarter, or think he is smarter. Smarter is not only difficult to prove, it 
is irrelevent as one person helping another is not a contest.
2) As human beings we believe the world revolves around us personally as we 
have difficulty developing objective thought. Therefore people say "I have 
this problem" with no diagnostic data, as if another person would naturally 
have the same experience.

The Problems arising from this are legion.
1) System problems get ascribed as bugs and people told. For instance Red Hat 
released a badly broken beta of Quanta in RH 8.0 without talking with us. We 
would have insured they had a version without the horrendous errors as we had 
a new version in thier release time window. Mandrake released a "community 
edition" which was a CVS pull where we were rewriting the parser. These are 
examples of distributions doing things that caused thousands of users who 
tried Quanta for the first time to say "what a piece of junk!" We heard from 
some of these users, but I'm afraid most simply dismissed us as incompetent 
developers. These are extreme examples, but many lessor ones exist both as a 
result of our code or distribution packaging. Our reputation is important to 
us, but often we can do little to affect it.

2) Because we don't have a huge test facility we depend on users during and 
after development to let us know if we missed some obscure and rare quirk. 
For instance we have found a few where a difference in the style of writing 
PHP caused dramatic differences. I chased down people bitching about the 
lousy performance of Quanta on a community web forum. They were happy to 
bitch and ditch. Others at least wrote and asked "Why does Quanta suck so 
much?" As it appeared a trend was appearing with a dozen or more complaints 
we persuaded people to send test files and found the bug. The old axiom in 
the US is if a congressman receives a letter then 999 other people felt the 
same way. I suspect it is similar that a great many never bothered to report 
the problem. 

Unless we can reporduce a problem we can't fix it. The greatest delusion of 
free software is that it will always continue because the code is there to 
pick up and work on. I can show you hundreds of dead projects. The real truth 
is that less than 1% of users make up the sum total of developers and 
financial supporters. When you include people actively involved in supporting 
and debugging it is probably still not much more than a few percent at best. 
Free software is about community. Is it common for communities to be 
supported by so few? Possibly, but in this case I think everyone who enters 
the community should examine their feelings after spending some time there 
and see if maybe it is more important than it first seemed.

The inevitable conclusion is that a very few people have to interface with a 
great many. Given that those few people determine whether a software project 
lives or dies (in practical rather than theoretical terms) it seems 
reasonable that for their service to the community they ask for a small 
reciprical effort from the community to assist them. If you are reading this 
you are one of hundreds on a list of users for a program used by millions... 
Andras and I are each one person with other projects and responsibilities, 
but we both care a great deal about this project.

My appeal to our core users is that you give your best effort to helping us 
with feedback, because without you we would produce a lessor program with 
more bugs and fewer features. If there is a real problem you haven't given us 
data on how many other people will give up and miss out on the great 
experience this program offers?

-- 
Eric Laffoon
Project Lead - kdewebdev module
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