Re: Kickstarter was not successful... but it did help things...

[Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller]

Gregory,

Am 19.12.2013 um 22:34 schrieb Gregory Casamento:

Dr. Schaller

On Thu, Dec 19, 2013 at 4:17 PM, Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller <hns@goldelico.com> wrote:

I just follow this discussion irregularily, because it is repeated every one or
two years and rarely a significant result.

Am 19.12.2013 um 20:27 schrieb Doc O'Leary:

> They certainly don't seem to be leading to discussions that improve the
> overall direction of the project.

I think you have hit the nail on the head. Maybe not even intentionally.

I think you faithfully assume that there is an overall direction.

To be honest, as someone who is contributing a little to GNUstep for 10 years now,
it is a project of let's say 10 or 15 individuals who have all their personal directions
and goals.

So there is no overall direction.

This is, unfortunately, very true.

 

Therefore it is obvious that nobody can work or improve the web pages etc. because
nobody knows what to write there in a way that it is a consistent story.

Everyone picks up some small fragment which promises the greatest fun (and learning
effect) and works on that. Therefore he can only write documentation for the fragment
he has been working on. So it is and remains patchwork.

The key problem IMHO is that GNUstep is missing leadership. Someone thinking
about AND defining the overall direction of the project *)

The problem is that I have been saying "go there" but, as you say, everyone has their own goals on this project.  And that's proper since it is an open source project.  They are allowed to have their own goals.  It is very difficult to tell people what to do when you are NOT paying them.

What I mean is that people can be asked to discuss their goals and to mirror them with some "official" goal so they know how much they share and support it. In my observation people often complain that they don't know the "official" goal and therefore just have abad feeling about the web pages (not the code) and everybody knows that it must be improved, but nobody knows how it should be.

So if not one person is standing up an saying "go there", we need some other
means. E.g. a democratic one. Like an opinion poll and majority votes. Or we
do a vote to empower a trustworthy person to define the overall directions for
e.g. one year.

The kickstarter can also be seen as the attempt of Gregory to become elected
into that leadership role by user's votes.

Really, is this what you think?  Wow...

Pardon me, but I earned the role by writing Gorm and also contributing heavily to GUI as well as other parts of GNUstep.  I was appointed this role by Richard Stallman and it was universally agreed upon that I should be lead by the people in the project at the time prior to you even being involved, sir.  I'm pretty offended by the suggestion that an attempt to drum up interest is seen as an attempt to gain a leadership role that I already possess.

Sorry if my words did sound offensive to you. I really appreciate that you have done the Kickstarter! And I did recognize it as a very valid approach for drumming for more public visibility of the role you have been appointed to. Since leadership has two faces: a formal one (being appointed by somebody) and then actively being recognized as the leader of the crowd by the public. THis includes e.g. permanently repeating the mantra of the project directions.

The Kickstarter can be seen as an attempt to do precisely what it was intended to do... get something going for this project.  The kickstarter was an attempt by me to get the project moving in a unified direction.

I have thought a little more about it and it may be even more fundamental that we have no overall direction. I for example don't know if GNUstep is intended to be "the Desktop GUI toolkit" of the GNU system. Or if it is just one of several free and open source projects without any connection (we even use more llvm and less gcc), because 20 years ago someone did think it could be a useful mosaic stone to donate the world an alternative to closed source systems like Windows, NeXT, UNIX(TM). So if RMS did appoint you to be the GNUstep maintainer, what does the GNU project expect from GNUstep?

In business life every project has a rationale and is embedded in higher level projects. The ultimate goals of an organization (company or charity or religion or government) is defined by the "president" (prepared by some strategy development committee). He has to listen to the project members and understand their needs of course or won't be elected again...

 

Doing this would IMHO (if well prepared) give a much clearer picture of the "overall
direction of the project", than e.g. discussing whether we should support UIKit or not.
Or if the project should make MacOS X users happy or not.

Then, and only then the web pages can be updated.

But we have a hen&egg problem. Since there is no leadership, nobody will do
such a poll.

LOL..  fine we'll do a poll.

What I would like to suggest is that we try to clarify this (if possible in a quantitative way):

* what is the ultimate goal of GNU running the GNUstep project?

* what do (potential) users of GNUstep need, to recognize a benefit over other roughly comparable systems (GTK, Qt, Cocoa, iOS, Windows, Android, whatever, ...)?

 

Just my 2 cts,
hns

*) compare with Linus who has the last word on every patch. So he has to be
convinced that some subsystem and change is good. And for deciding what is
good or not he must have dreams, visions, values.

I have overall veto power on what does and does not go into GNUstep.  I don't use this often since, unfortunately, not as many people are contributing as there should be.  SimpleWebKit was included into GNUstep with my approval.

 

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Gregory Casamento
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