GNOME Ignoring its Own Users?

Jonathan writes "Some editorials were posted on the web the last few days about GNOME and its apparent lack of interest on user feedback, especially when GNOME pitches itself to follow a 'users first philosophy' in their press releases. OSNews started with an editorial about market research or lack thereof, Expert-Zone posted another one on how OSS must learn to take responsibility on its great success."

Comments

For those just joining the discussion

[Anonymous Coward]

For those just joining the discussion, you MUST read the whole thread, "roadmap status update/update request", Luis Villa, http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/ 2005-March/thread.html#00078

They didn't tell her to STFU or to F off & die. They gave her reasons why her idea for an official poll would not work. They gave her reasonable suggestions on how & why feature requests may go unfulfilled. She rallied & reiterated her points but they did not fall on dead ears. Read through the mailing list and see it for yourself. She is just one person and is guaranteed to have her own opinion. They are devels working on it & they have their own opinions.

See also a coincidental GNOME dev blog, March 10 Jakub Steiner's blog on how to request features: http://jimmac.musichall.cz/weblog.php

Re:For those just joining the discussion

[Anonymous Coward]

They didn't tell her to STFU or to F off & die.

Sure ?

Re:For those just joining the discussion

[ajs]

Interesting thread. The basic concept is this: "we should have a page specially designed for tracking feature requests".

The answers varied, but seemed to center on "no, we have bugzilla" and "if you want to do that with bugzilla, create a special query page for devs to review feature requests."

This sounds like reasonable advice to me....

Re:For those just joining the discussion

[955301]

Yep. After all, those posts came after this one, and at some point, you have to blow the whistle and get the fans off the court so you can continue:


Jeff was certainly curt, and perhaps should have been gentler in making
the point, but he's probably right too. In his judgment (and mine too,
fwiw) that thread was doomed to produce very little impact, a lot of
noise.

Something GNOME enthusiasts on this list often seem to forget is that
its *not* just their time. When you send a message to a mailing list,
you are asking for everyone to spend some time on it. When you start a
thread that will draw lots of replies, you are, unwittingly or not,
asking for everyone on the list (including hackers) to spend lots of
time.

I define the GNOME enthusiast community as: those who are actively
involved with and interested in GNOME but have NOT contributed large
quantities of code, translation or documentation (there are several
exceptional cases, for example Jeff himself, but not a lot). We need
enthusiasts and should value them! It provides a source of excitement,
sociability, feedback on how we're doing in different areas, and
sometimes even new ideas.

But right now, the lists have become driven by the enthusiast community
to the extent that hackers have gone into hiding. A good thread on
desktop-devel-list *should* be predominantly (75% or more, say, as a
totally arbitrary number) posts by core GNOME hackers related to that
area. Look at a thread now.... probably 90% of the posts are by
enthusiasts. That's taking "being in touch with the community" a little
too far to the point that its hard to get work done ;-)

For example, most of the people actually writing code that will be in
the next GNOME release have probably been actively deleting every
message to this theme thread! Its not because they don't care, its
because they don't want to take the time away from working on gnome to
wade through all the noise. And they shouldn't have to.

Compared to its peak as a lively discourse among the hackers doing core
contributions to the gnome codebase, desktop-devel-list is almost a dead
list in terms of "useful things accomplished". Part of the problem is a
*very* high noise level, and also very annoying persistent threads of
the bike shed variety.

Something people only relatively recently involved in GNOME (last couple
years) wonder is about the relative silence / non-responsiveness of core
hackers. It seems like desktop-devel-list, despite all the traffic, has
very few people who are getting something done (see usability gnome org
for an even worse example of this that is even more my fault). That the
lists we (core hackers) used to haunt have become a tangle of weeds is
one of the major factors driving this.

As community leaders in GNOME, one of our jobs is to shepherd the lists
so they do not become exceedingly noisy (and scare away important hacker
to hacker traffic). But we have largely abdicated this responsibility in
the last couple years. markmc tried to fight the tide about a year ago,
but eventually gave up. Its hard *because* we're actually very nice
people, and thus none of us want to be the list nazi. But its also very
important to have this sort of pruning to be a healthy community.

We've been talking about this a lot lately in s33kret cabal discussions.
That we feel the need to have these private circles is part of the
problem! Nobody, even those of us involved in the cabal (and especially
not Jeff who is an outspoken supporter of openness and inclusion), want
this sort of private exclusionary construct.

So what's the point?

1) Desktop-devel-list, #gnome-hackers, etc have been drowned by a deluge
of well meaning (and healthy, when found in moderation) enthusiast
involvement.
2) The loss of effective communication channels has had a major negative
impact on the amount and p

This has been happening for a while

[ErichTheWebGuy]

This has been going on for quite some time. That is why people who are fed up started their own Gnome branch, GoneMe that fixes the things they think are wrong with Gnome.

Environments vs. Simple WIndow managers

[SCHecklerX]

I'm getting annoyed at the current trend too. It's becoming increasingly difficult to have my environment behave the way that *I* want it to. Why do we need all of this stuff anyway? Isn't a standard Xdnd and current IPC enough to properly integrate pretty much anything without depending on a bunch of crap like 'gnome-settings-daemon' running?

I digress, the above is a slightly different rant. Not all user stuff is bad. I have sent MANY suggestions to the ROX team, and they have all made it into the software. ROX now depends on the stuff ranted about in the first paragraph, however :(

Before the flaming starts

[Anonymous Coward]

I think both editorials have a point but both are also unfair to the developers (especially Eugenias rant).

I think the problem is not that the devs don't care about what the users want, but that there today is no working infrastracture making it possible for the users to give feedback to the developers in a meaningful (for the developers) way.

Anyway, before the flaming starts, read the relevant mailing list thread here:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-deve l-list/ 2005-March/thread.html
(roadmap status update/update request)
and you might get an idea why some developers didn't react to kind to Eugenias contributions. (To put it short, she acts incredibly annoying)

Join GnomeLove, it will help all

[anandpur]

GnomeLove is an initiative that aims to help people who want to get started contributing to GNOME

GnomeLove

Re:Join GnomeLove, it will help all

[Anonymous Coward]

Been there, got flamed to death, had verbal attacks with some assholes there.

The grand secret of spatial nautilus

[ultrabot]

I hereby share the great secret of making the most of spatial Nautilus.

1. Create a "places" folder weher you drag shortcuts to your favourite folders (you know, the usual: mp3, pr0n, work, school). ctrl+shift+drag = create shortcut (symlink). Put the "places" folder on desktop & toolbar.

2. Press ctrl+q to "kill all windows" when you've done whatever you were trying to do w/ file manager.

Yeah, it still doesn't approach the glory that is Konqueror but it's not worse than "browse" mode of Nautilus either.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[nadamsieee]

RTFA! Eugenia did try to DO something about it. She may be the Dvorak of OSNews (I don't know or care), but even a broken clock shows the right time twice a day; IMHO, she nailed this one.

F/OSS must figure out how to add users to the feedback loop if they want to compete. Software nirvana = Free/Open Source + Inclusive/Meaningful User Feedback

Re:Don't feed the troll

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

She did offer to get her hands dirty and did offer a solution. Read the thread where she offers to write a PHP solution to the problem.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Pentavirate]

She actually did offer to work with the devs to identify the features most requested. She offered to write a php script to take the feature requests from bugzilla and allow people for a period of time to vote for their favorite 3 requests. When she offered to do this work for the devs is when they came back with their infamous statement that the only way a feature will get coded is if a dev wants to do it (ie has a need for it personally).

All of this information is in the second article.

Re:Fork Gnome!

[joshsnow]

have this feeling that the "OSS will rule the world" crowd are not the ones actually developing the software.In fact, I am not sure where they came from...

Linus Torvalds has repeated stated "World Domination" as a goal of Linux based systems. There's a start for you.

Re:Before the flames begin...

[tedrlord]

Here's the thing, though. These people are coding this on their own free time, for their own enjoyment. A lot of them are programmers for a living, forced to write things a particular way all day. Open source is a way to vent their frustration and express their creativity. They can be as elegant as they want. They don't worry about the old feeping creatures. It's their code.

How many people want to come home after work every day to emails from Gnome, telling them to do more coding they don't enjoy? Especially if those people have friends, families, or other concerns? What the article proposes is turning a hobby these people do for their own fulfillment into an unpaid job. How many programmers would the community lose?

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not read the article? First, it wasn't her or the Slashdot poster who equated "wants to do it" to "need for it personally," it was the Gnome developers in response to her questions. Second. the Gnome developers stated that they intentionally turned off the voting system on their bugzilla because they didn't want to be bothered with what the users wanted.

Parent poster hit it on the nose

[Anonymous Coward]

The parent poster hit things square on the nose. Gnome developers did say there were interested in user feedback, but Eugenia either disregarded them or deliberately twisted what they said when she posted her "Gnome developers don't want to listen to user feedback" article (she was miffed that they didn't give her special treatment and/or that they didn't do things her way).

Here's an incomplete list of examples from the very thread that spawned the article:

Havoc said:

"We [are interested in user feedback], but we have better ways to find out than web polls.

I'm interested in what your features are, because I like as much data as possible. But I'm not going to be surprised or think it reflects any
fundamental breakage in GNOME if nobody gets around to those features. There are only enough developers to implement maybe 1% of what gets
requested."

Federico stated:

"In general, field research would be more beneficial in the long run. Real users --- random people who go to Brazilian Telecentros, office clerks in European cities --- don't know where to report their annoyances with free software. They don't have time to find out about
it as they just want to get things done. You have to go to them, ask them, and watch them use the software."

Bastien said:

"I usually implement features when they are unintrusive, make the software easier to use, and when people ask nicely for them, without spamming or rambling on about them."

Shaun added:

"The problem with all these voting systems is that they have sample bias written all over them. The majority of users, real users, don't go onto bugzilla, and they don't vote in web polls on osnews. Market research is not the same thing as polling the enthusiast community...

And I *did* implement a voting system for Yelp features, but nobody voted"

A bit overblown

[readams]

Since I'm the developer directly quoted in both articles (I guess I had the best sound bite), I should probably offer a clarification. Stating that a feature will be implemented if and only if there is a developer who wants to implement it is merely a statement of reality.

However, to claim that this means that I personally or other GNOME devs don't care about users is an exaggeration. Users requesting a feature quite often is a way to get a developer to want to implement the feature, especially since free software developers want their projects to be good and widely used.

All we were saying in that thread is we already know what features are widely requested. Adding voting merely creates an illusion that the votes will, in the end, count for something meaningful. In reality the best the votes could provide is a biased sample of oft-requestedness, which we can already discern by comments on bugzilla bugs and duplicates. We do care about users and we do care about their concerns.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[QuantumG]

Don't forget that some people actually get paid to work on GNOME.. these people are happy to work on the feature requests of customers as it encourages those customers to buy the next release of the product. Of course, Eugenia isn't actually a paying customer of any of the companies that pay those developers, she wants people to work on her feature requests for free, even if they have no interest in them.

Developers' replies

[BenjyD]

planet.gnome.org has a load of GNOME developers responding to the two articles in a far more logical and intelligent way than the articles deserve.

Somebody like Eugenia who runs such a badly-implemented news+comment site really shouldn't complain about GNOME not implementing features the users want.