Glenn Willen ([info]gwillen) wrote,
@ 2009-03-14 14:51:00
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Dear lord, it appears that the GNOME developers have completely lost their fucking minds:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=552387

*sigh* This is the sort of bullshit I really hate about open source. You give people lots of power and no accountability, and lo and behold, they do stupid shit. I wish there were a good solution to this.

EDIT: Oh, and I think the only reason that everybody is being so civil on that bug, in light of the developers being COMPLETELY OFF THE RAILS, is that there's a threat at the bottom from the moderators to ban people who rant. Lulz.

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[info]memnus
2009-03-14 07:27 pm UTC (link)
I don't speak bugzilla. What's the insanity there?

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[info]gwillen
2009-03-14 07:30 pm UTC (link)
Sorry, I should have explained in more detail in the original post. Basically the GNOME developers removed an important (to many users) feature, in a minor release, without even mentioning it in the release notes, because they've decided they want to change how it's written (but the change isn't finished yet.)

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[info]chaos5023
2009-03-14 07:28 pm UTC (link)
Truly, it does wonders for FOSS adoption when it's communicated to users that their existence and adoption is an annoying inconvenience to the developers.

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[info]jgrafton
2009-03-14 07:33 pm UTC (link)
Comment #48 from André Klapper (points: 29)
2008-12-17 14:53 UTC [reply]
Paolo, Manu: Whining does not really help in getting things fixed.
"What's the hold up?" Write the code for it and attach it here.



I love open source.

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[info]twizmer
2009-03-14 07:36 pm UTC (link)
That one was classy. I also liked

Comment #64 from André Klapper (points: 29)
2009-02-04 11:33 UTC [reply]

doncot: so what? not helpful at all.

This is totally the best way to reply to someone trying to give you information.

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[info]twizmer
2009-03-14 07:34 pm UTC (link)
Pay for custom-designed software. Fire developers who don't do what they're being paid to do. There's your solution.
Alternatively, pay for mass-produced software, and pray that the less direct threat of lost income will motivate the seller to do what you want.

Sometimes you really do get what you pay for.

Also, Andre Klapper is apparently a total dick.

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[info]gwillen
2009-03-14 07:39 pm UTC (link)
I dunno, I thought William Jon McCann took the large-view dick medal, for seriously advocating that "user experience" is improved by leaving the code out rather than shipping whatever desperate attempt exists at making it work.

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[info]twizmer
2009-03-14 08:03 pm UTC (link)
It depends whether you're more concerned about the guy making really broad, sweeping, and idiotic speeches, or the guy in the trenches telling everyone to fuck off. They're all dicks, in their own special ways.

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[info]dachte
2009-03-14 08:02 pm UTC (link)
Or, alternatively, don't use GNOME (or at least don't use it as a complete desktop environment).

Paying for software is usually just as much of a crapshoot as finding opensource software you'd like.

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[info]twizmer
2009-03-14 08:06 pm UTC (link)
You have at least slightly more hope of influencing design decisions. Companies selling software may be out of touch with what their users want, but they usually at least realize that they need to keep their users happy to keep making money.
The first answer is actually the best; if you want someone to do something the way you want it, pay them for it specifically. Of course this is infeasible in many situations, oh well.

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[info]dachte
2009-03-14 08:25 pm UTC (link)
I'd like to think that, but practically all the software that I actually like(d) is opensource. The list of exceptions is quite short, including DB/2, Mathematica, Solaris, and a handful of games (and historically Lotus Improv, NeXTStep, and Microsoft QuickC).

Generally when I'm dissatisfied with an opensource program, there's another one that does the job better, or there isn't a closed program that's even roughly competitive.

It's probably amusing that they compete and because they compete I only use one of them nowadays, but vim and Xemacs are great examples of opensource software - very deep, very configurable, quite powerful, usable for more than just their original purpose, and not hard to extend.

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[info]chrisamaphone
2009-03-14 10:36 pm UTC (link)
photoshop is the one big example that comes to my mind.

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[info]dachte
2009-03-14 07:59 pm UTC (link)
The pidgin developers are brain-damaged in a much more amusing way..

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[info]gwillen
2009-03-14 08:00 pm UTC (link)
Oh? What's their specific malfunction?

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[info]dachte
2009-03-14 08:12 pm UTC (link)
They're famous for ignoring large outcries from their users over changes they occasionally make, and want them to be all the same. For something as personal as an IM client, they are really reluctant to add preferences when they change something, and in many cases feel strongly about a change that they intentionally make it hard to add plugins to alter whatever they change. Both times that they've added means on their website or otherwise for users to better communicate on what changes they want in pidgin, hordes of users showed up and yelled at them, causing them to close down the service. They're similarly blunt on IRC, demanding that people "prove" that the old way they did thing were better, and dismissing any arguments as not being proof. Every so often they act sad on the development blog that they get so much flak about this.

For similar-but-more-extreme hilarity, consider the developer of Ion, who's taken a loathing of antialiased fonts rather far.

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[info]gwillen
2009-03-14 08:33 pm UTC (link)
Oh yes, I now do recall the Pidgin flap over resizing the input text area, and other such. Also I have read the Ion guy's hilarious rantings.

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[info]relaxatorium
2009-03-14 08:37 pm UTC (link)
Honestly, there are a lot of positive things to be said for a development team making actual design decisions and then being able to make software that simply works optimally in those design parameters.

FOSS Software has a general habit of settling arguments about design choices as "we'll do both and put a checkbox on the preferences", and I think a lot of the time that leads to both bloated confusing preference boxes and also many options that are supported in mediocre fashion, rather than a smaller number of application workflows that actually work well.

As a note, I have no idea of the Pidgin guys are actually thinking this way, or if they are just fucking obstinate.

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[info]twizmer
2009-03-14 09:24 pm UTC (link)
I understand this sentiment, but that doesn't explain going out of your way to make it harder for somebody else to add the feature in as a plugin.

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[info]dachte
2009-03-15 12:06 am UTC (link)
The Pidgin people have "got religion" about the way people should IM and how the UI should look. Their attitude seems to be that if you don't like the way they do it, you're objectively wrong and should "fork or fuck off". As a result, I think there are two projects that forked off pidgin to undo some of their least popular interface changes.

So long as it's possible to do it cleanly, having software with a lot of configuration options and ideally a scripting language is a good thing, at least for geeks. Whether we're better off having "public/high priority" config options and then a "you're on your own if you mess with these" like Mozilla's about:config, several levels of options (a lot of KDE apps, and a fair number of bittorrent clients), or some other way to figure out how much we're willing to scare the user with lots of options they probably shouldn't touch until/unless they decide to learn a lot more, if there are clean enough abstractions that can be lain so the configuration permutations don't result in ill-tested codepaths, there shouldn't be a problem.

To relaxatorium: I do *not* want people thinking about workflows with vim or xemacs with an eye to chopping things down. That kind of thing might fly on OSX with its general design philosophy, but a lot of people use more traditional Unices because they provide an intentionally overrich, overconfigurable, overscriptable environment. A swiss army knife or computer toolkit is a lot less useful if you let that philosophy revise it.

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[info]gustavolacerda
2009-03-16 12:47 am UTC (link)
great! I should get a pidgin fork.

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[info]zahariel
2009-03-14 09:07 pm UTC (link)
I think this entire fiasco is endemic of most FOSS communities. It's clear to me that "someone in power" (someone irreplaceable) in the GNOME community is violently opposed to the entire concept of session persistence. So he took it out without telling anyone. And now everyone else on the GNOME project is trying to figure out what happened and appease all the users who actually wanted this without pissing off the person who did this. The ION guy vs. antialiased fonts is basically the same thing; there's no stick to threaten these people with, so they can do anything and still have all the carrots they want.

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[info]gwillen
2009-03-14 09:11 pm UTC (link)
violently opposed to the entire concept of session persistence

I think it's slightly more subtle -- someone is violently opposed to the old protocol for session persistence, on the grounds that it's "ugly", and so forcibly ripped it out despite there being no replacement.

Prima donnas, etc.

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[info]platypuslord
2009-03-14 09:25 pm UTC (link)
I'm reminded of this quote from Jeff Vogel, who wrote Avernum:
"Oh, and by the way? No sane game designer reads the forums. No matter 
how sensible a change you make to a game, there will always be a pack of
screaming yahoos tearing it apart. If you let those people get into your
head, it'll paralyze you. That's why they stay away. Just so you know."

I've seen this happen myself on the WoW forums. There's always someone who believes his communication will be given more weight if its tone is "completely batshit furious". I believe the developers stopped reading the forums for exactly this reason.

The situation with free software may be a bit different from the situation with video game development. (But maybe not! [info]dachte's comment about the Pidgin developers sounds quite similar.)

I don't know very much about the specific removed feature you're posting about, but the description I am hearing is: "A bunch of people on the Internet flamed this guy for doing something with his project that they disagreed with, and despite all the email he didn't back down."

I dunno.

Edited at 2009-03-14 09:27 pm UTC

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[info]gwillen
2009-03-14 09:59 pm UTC (link)
Well, part of the problem is that it isn't "this guy" or "his project". It's the most-used Linux window manager on the planet. It has a huge nonprofit organization behind it. To my mind, that makes it inexcusable to do certain problematic things that would be more forgivable if an individual developer on his own project did them, like dropping support for a major feature in a minor release with no notice...did I mention that this feature is responsible for notifying programs that a shutdown is occurring, so that if you log out on a GNOME system with this feature missing, all your unsaved work will immediately be discarded without prompting?

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[info]twizmer
2009-03-14 10:44 pm UTC (link)
Also, a lot of the devs just acted like dicks. The complaints were hardly flames; they were all reasonably phrased things amounting to "this useful feature has died; can you bring it back? Is there actual effort to fix this bug or is it just sitting here?" And the tone of the responses from the developers was pretty much "fuck you, submit or a patch or diaf"

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[info]dachte
2009-03-15 12:15 am UTC (link)
Jeff's statement sounds curiously close to "don't listen to anyone who might disagree/argue with you". Developing a thicker skin is probably healthier - there's a difference between alienating a lot of your users and alienating a few. It's also probably more likely that game developers will have reason to make changes that must affect most/all their users than other types of developers (e.g. to address concerns about game balance). One game I've played for several years now is Kingdom of Loathing - the developers are all active on the forums, and while there are a few people that are well known for complaints about everything under the sun, occasionally they also take ideas from the forums, and they often explain their decisions.

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[info]wjl
2009-03-15 05:18 am UTC (link)
i'm vaguely reminded of joel spolsky's bit about rewriting code from scratch (Things You Should Never Do, Part I). it's such a base instinct, but so often dangerously wrong! :)

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