When Volunteer And Commercial Developers Don't Mesh

An "Anonymous" but easily identifiable person submitted a commercial about a story at LinuxPlanet about what happens when Volunteers and Commercial Developers have different goals over what is good for the Linux Community.unity and how it might affect code. The article is largely about KDE and Corel. Please keep the flame turned down on this one, as it's a critical issue that still hasn't been solved.

Comments

Re:Dev hostility to test

[dfaure]

I agree with you. Except when you call the article author a developer, since he's not. He'e a KDE enthousiast and Corel hater at the same time.

YES, KDE developers are very grateful for Corel's input !
I can even prove it : I've digged up the best cvs comment about that: look at this one and this one.
The truth is not always well written in a nice article linked from Slashdot, it's sometimes hidden in CVS logs :-)

Is there a problem?

[chris.bitmead]

Experience would suggest that anyone, whether corporate or individual, who gets involved with a project and makes suggestions; if that person/individual makes good suggestions and especially offer to implement them they'll be accepted. But if they are not particularly good suggestions they won't. Free software projects don't tend to accept patches if they are a hack just to solve some pressing corporate strategy.

Now Corel or whoever can go ahead and fork either the entire KDE or individual applications inside KDE. And the user community will either accept it or not. Most probably they won't because corporate maintained software doesn't tend to get maintained. So any sensible company should be desperately wanting to show a bit of diplomacy and get their changes integrated into the main project.

How is this a problem?

[blaine]

If the KDE developers don't want to use the suggestions Corel gives it, they don't have to.

To be honest, I'd say the guy has a lot of valid points. And if he's been doing UI design for a while, I'd say he could probably bring a lot to KDE.

Contrary to popular belief, UIs are NOT easy to design so that they are intuitive for average users. The KDE team is working on it, I'm sure, but it can't hurt to have somebody help out. Christ, I'm sure there are some OSS projects that would DIE to have a professional UI guy helping out, especially one paid for by a major corporation. But instead of showing some gratitude, they write an article about how Corel might be subverting the KDE project.

To be honest, EVERY SINGLE PERSON who works on KDE is subverting it, in a sense. They are working on it because they want it to work in a way that will please THEM. Corel is no different than your average KDE developer. They want certain features, and they're going to try to get them done.

If they'd wanted to, they could've just started uploading changes to CVS, but they didn't. They filed reports about them, and gave the community the chance to discuss them. And to be honest, I agree with most of the ones listed in this article as being 'bad'. They make sense, especially considering Corel wants KDE to be ready for normal users.

Anyways, just thoughts.

Dev hostility to test

[konstant]

I am not qualified to assess whether Corel is a creeping black cancre on open source, BUT... being a profssional tester I am regrettably over-qualified to address the tone of hostility the author assumes towards testing. He writes in part:

"Changing file types is an advanced feature, and it should not be so easily accessible from a right-click menu," said one, on June 9. "A new user could easily handicap his or her system by accidentally playing around with settings without a clear understanding of their purpose." A bug? What here isn't working as designed? Or a dumbing down of KDE? Is there a single case of any KDE user ever "handicapping his or her system" by slapdash changing of file types?

It may be that the bug database for Debian is structured in such a way as to distinguish "bugs" from "design change requests". However, the supercilious attitude this developer assumes towards a voluntary bug submission is way too common in computing. Open source projects trawling for contributors often proclaim 'if you can't code, file bugs!' but if this is the attitude a bug filed in goodwill can expect to generate, don't be suprised to see your userbase ossify out to 99% hard-core developers and only 1% or 2% OSS newbies.

It's an unfortunate fact that development often looks down upon test, not the least because QA is staffed by typically less-educated or -skilled individuals. Keep in mind, however, that without this buffer of moderately knowledgeable testers between consumers and devs with their fingers stuffed in the code, many key issues of usability and quality will be pooh-poohed right out the door. The dialogs aren't consistent? Well who gives a fuck! They work, don't they? Ship it!

When you're getting QA input for free, don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!