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Pidgin Controversy Triggers Fork
paleshadows writes "Pidgin, the premier multi-protocol
instant messaging client, has been forked. This is the result of a heated, emotional, and
very interesting debate over a controversial new feature: As of
version 2.4, the ability to manually resize the text input area has
been removed; instead, it automatically resizes depending on how much
is typed. It turns out that this feature, along with the uncompromising
unwillingness of the developers to provide an option to turn it off,
annoys the bejesus of very many users.
One
comment made by a Professor that teaches "Collaboration in an Open
Source World" argued that 'It's easy to see why open source developers could develop dogmas. [...]
The most dangerous dogma is the one exhibited
here: the God feature. "One technological solution can meet
every possible user-desired variation of a feature." [...]
You [the developers] are ignoring the fan base with a dedication to your convictions
that is alarmingly evident to even the most unobservant of followers,
and as such, you are demonstrating that you no longer deserve to be in
the position of servicing the needs of your user base.'" Does anyone besides me find this utterly ridiculous?
This whole situation reeks of some crusty developer stuck in his ways.
If there's no technical reason not to allow both options with a simple option in a menu somewhere, then yes it is ridiculous. If there is some downside to allowing users to resize the text input area then a fork is exactly what is needed. Open source is awesome.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
More options are always better, right?
I mean, sure, forking a project means that we now have fewer developers concentrating on a product than before, but it's for the best because now we'll have two IM clients that are nearly identical except for some minor things. All because some programmers are egotistical assholes!
The Open Source world needs to grow the fuck up. More options aren't always better - more good options are better, more options for the sake of having more options or because you can't learn to play nicely with the other kids are stupid.
I know some will probably tag this as a troll or a flamebait, however IMHO this is exactly why Linux will never be able to really replace either Windows or Mac OS X for desktop usage.
Too many people who think they know better than the end-users, and too much work being done by lots of people on different, competing projects. You need to unite your efforts, not work against each others. This fork is just another proof (and WTH is with that "premier multi-protocol instant messaging client" remark? Nobody uses that on Windows and Mac OS X).
The whole KDE vs Gnome debate is one of the things that keeps Windows on PCs.
Posted as AC because of Linux and OSS zealots.
All too often on software projects, I see someone spend several days figuring out a neat thing to implement that they personally think is a great addition.
...
And when it comes time to remove it they defend it. They may even realize that they were wrong thinking everyone would love it. But they just don't want to give up that code that cost them so much time to figure out and write.
Coding for several days only to realize that you need to throw everything you wrote away is one of the hardest skills for a developer to learn
My work here is dung.
Add the following in Preferences window:
[X] Allow resizing of chat input area
-William Brendel
"Does anyone besides me find this utterly ridiculous?"
Depends on what you mean. Do I find it ridiculous that developers are ignoring a sizable portion of their userbase and implementing a feature that many people would like to disable? Yes, I find it ridiculous. Not terribly surprising, but ridiculous nonetheless.
Do I find it ridiculous that it's causing a project to fork? Not particularly. This is supposed to be the one of the greatest advantages of open source; if you don't like the way people play, you can pick up the pieces and start your own game. Silly me, I had secretly hoped that the threat of something like this happening would keep software like pidgin from ignoring its user base. Guess I was wrong.
Seems like something that would be done to a Gnome app. Hope that's just a coincidence. Back to Kopete I guess.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Just staying AC
But, yeah it's no joke... I gave up on being a test engineer for software after being let go (along with some others) at M.S. because I a would not pass a product with a clearly significant usability flaw. The development said it was by design and a feature. (Very similiar to the resizing functions mentioned above.)
I went and did the numbers and a full quality project, VOC data, etc. I presented my case at a later build. The developer, not having any actual evidence but his opinion, went into a flame war, trying to take me down. Effectively, I was insulting is 'intellegence' and want to 'undo months of work'. When that failed, he called me racist. He won, I got let go. I found out he was let go a couple months later over trying to defend the same 'feature' after a presentation with some higher ups, and insulted someone above him.
These flame wars happen all to much, I've found many programmers have 'control issues', perhaps that's what makes them good programmers; but lousy decision makers.
Well, in all honesty I don't think it's over the text area so much as the fact that those in charge are adamant about allowing anyone to configure the client as they see fit. This is just a small symptom; the underlying cause is unbridled arrogance and muleheaded stubbornness.
While I completely agree with your premise - that usability is often the opposite of allowing configurable options for everything - I think that the way they made the dialog behave is not the right way. I have never seen another application do what pidgin now does. In general, that doesn't necessarily make it the wrong thing to do but in this case I think it does.
I agree that simplicity is almost always better, but I would say that good usability is always about listening to user feedback. Basically this change flunked the usability test for a lot of folks and the developers should find a way to elegantly implement that option. There's undoubtedly a way to add this ability without adding "useless clutter." And I would say this clutter wouldn't be useless since people are asking for it.
This space intentionally left blank.
You are absolutely right if the project only ever has to support a single UI option. However, products that expect to be around for a few years accumulate dozens of such options. At this point, nobody has the bandwidth to test every possible configuration or fix bugs that only affect a few users who chose a particular combination. The code which is not used in default configuration is likely to not work properly with new core code, not be ported to additional platforms and plain look ugly with main UI which is skinned for a particular layout. Users who try the product on someone else's machine walk away with a negative impression as it has been customized to something that most people find unusable.
On the other hand, if you fix the UI, lots of users will complain initially. A majority of those will quickly adjust and stop noticing the difference. Some will walk away or fork the project. However, for those that stick around are much more likely to find that the UI functions properly in the manner intended than if the attention of developers was spread among thousands of possible configurations.
It's a basic choice for a project developer to do one thing well or provide many options where some or all do not work quite as well.
Clearly, this is a matter of personal preference, nothing more. Luckily for me, Psi has an option to choose either behavior...
I couldn't agree with you more. GAIM is superior to Pidgin for the reasons you mention. I tried to compile Pidgin once, and it requires that pile-of-crap GnuTLS that I couldn't get to compile for the life of me. OpenSSL, of course, works great. I use CenterIM now and couldn't be happier.
This is the "ego bigger than brains" mentality that permeates the open-source community and it pisses me off. This is the same mentality that resulted in Firefox/Thunderbird with their paucity of configuration options compared to Mozilla.
What? You mean I have to configure a "blahdeyblah.blah.blah.yippideedoodaa" parameter in an "advanced configuration" section? How the hell is that "easy-of-use". The old Mozilla provided me that parameter straight-away in a nice graphical dialog box.
Sorry, but some nerd-ass software developer (I include myself in this class of individual) doesn't know jack about UI design. That's right, I, myself, don't know jack about UI design. And neither do you, Joe Linux programmer! Let's listen to the users and make nice easy-to-use software with lots of well-organized options available.
I frequently exchange paragraph-long messages with my friends on IM. I frequently exchange code bits on IM with my colleagues. The Pidgin developers are ignorant idiots thinking that people only send "one-line messages" on IM. Who the hell are they to say that I can't exchange code bits with my colleagues? What's their IM username? I'll send them some source code one line at a time!
Honestly, the best way to deal with it would be to auto-resize unless the user explicitly changes the size. From that point on, give them control of the window.
But if you look at the images in the linked page, there definitely appear to be some usability concerns here.
Microsoft releases whatever they damn well please and everyone has to upgrade or else they can't open docx files from work.
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