Re: Users versus developers (was: Tempo mark alignment)

[Graham Percival]

On Sat, May 23, 2009 at 09:57:20PM -0500, Tim McNamara wrote:
>
> On May 23, 2009, at 5:05 PM, Anthony W. Youngman wrote:
>
>> Unfortunately, Tim's point is at odds with the philosophy of free  
>> software - which can be pretty succinctly stated as "he who writes the 
>> software makes the rules".
>
> Ummm.  That's not the philosophy of free software.

I think this was a misunderstanding of a joke I made a week or two
ago.  I played off the "golden rule: he who has the gold, makes
the rules" joke to say "he who does the work, makes the rules" in
reference to disagreements between me and new doc contributors.

I was saying that even if I disagreed with the way that somebody
wanted to write the docs, if they were willing to spend 20 hours
doing it and I wasn't, then I wouldn't complain about the way they
did it, provided that I'd explained the problems I saw in their
design.


> Because if those things adversely affect my use of the application, the 
> odds are very good it adversely affects someone else's and maybe lots of 
> someone else's use of the software.  Graham's idea (I am interpolating 
> here, he can correct me if I'm wrong) that "people should be willing to 
> put into the project is very valid."

No.  My idea is "don't insult people doing work for free".

We know about the bug.  We know about 399 other bugs.  We work on
whatever we feel like working on, in whatever spare time we have,
depending on our full-time jobs, graduate student work, families,
trying to find a family (i.e. partner), eating, sleeping, etc.

Demanding that we work on one particular bug -- which might not
even be a problem for our own pesonal scores -- is a *great* way
to make developers lose interest in lilypond.

> It is very myopic to define "helping" as "writing code" 
> (this is a widespread problem in the FOSS community).

That is the furthest thing from my mind.  I've spent more effort
than anybody else in the lilypond community doing everything *but*
writing code.

> On the other hand, I am a psychologist with some knowledge of
> how people interact with information and those skills might
> offer a way to contribute and I have tried to do that.  Also, my
> use (and others') of the software, feedback on its usability,
> etc. is of utility.

Perhaps you only joined the lilypond community recently; that
would explain your absence during GDP (Sep 2007 to Aug 2008).  If
so, I'd like to invite you to consider helping more with the
people-information and feedback in a few weeks, when I start GDP2.

Cheers,
- Graham