You and I are generally talking past each other, of course, as you are more complaining about whiney users (as inspired by K.Mandla’s post), whereas I’m more refuting the validity of what I take to be K.Mandla’s point here. It’s fine to complain about ingratitude, sloth, etc., but I think it falls apart when those complaints seem to hypocritically turn towards telling anyone how they should or should not run their project.

“it’s the developers that are doing the work and that means they get to make the decisions” … including when they decide to let “the mob” decide.

Not that I’m fond of beating dead horses, but my point remains that the entire reason software is written is so that it may be used. The question at hand is for whom is the software being written? If the developers are writing the software for themselves, and then sharing it with others in the event that others may find it useful, then that’s awesome. If the developers are writing software for some external group of users, then that’s also awesome, and it really makes a lot of sense to ask those users what they want and try to provide that.

“I suppose it’s all wrapped up in what your expectations are from the developers (and what the developers expectations are of the userbase).”

In this case, the developers specifically sought input from the users/others and decided to listen to that input. How can one begrudge them that?

I find the suggestion that developers shouldn’t do what other people suggest rather ironic.

I’m using Arch myself at home, work and on desktop and servers. What K.Mandla write has affected Arch several times, and its leadership has been tested.

It’s been quite calm lately but a couple of years ago an influx of new users also meant an influx of opinions about what Arch should become. In response the leadership was clear: Arch is not a democracy. That stand did really upset a few, who for some reason thought, maybe still think, that a majority of “passive” users can dictate what the active developing team should do or not do. I remember a few who continued to make silly exaggerated claims at Distrowatch and other places, accusing the leadership of Arch to be thugs.

The only thing this turmoil proved was that those who “revolted” would potentially sabotage any community if given the chance. In this sense I agree with K.Mandla. Free software doesn’t equal “no strong leadership”. To succeed in providing a good product a leadership has to have the guts of making unpopular decisions. Mistakes are inevitable, but it’s still better to make a couple of extra mistakes than loosing control and jeopardize the whole project.

Personally, I work on a small Puppy Linux spinoff from time to time. As with Kmandlas GTK 1.2 remix it is mostly my personal plaything, but I allways appreciate feedback and bug reports from users, because there are far too many- impossible for me to track them all.

It always is a give and take. Listen to your users, give them what they want (just enough to keep them on the leash ) and they will help you with making your distro better.

Cheers,
Christian

The second statement you make is true in an ideal world. Open source sprung up from developers making things for other developers. Look at the suckless community, they are essentially developers working on tools that they all use. Of course, not ALL suckless users are also suckless developers. However, they ARE expected to understand the code they’re using and be able to use supporting utilities to make the tools given to them work (for instance, dmenu is rather useless without understanding some shell scripting) In this sense, ALL suckless users are developers.

I suppose it’s all wrapped up in what your expectations are from the developers (and what the developers expectations are of the userbase). I don’t need my hand held to install OOo, so I don’t really care one way or the other if it ships with UNR (or moblin or… etc.). Ubuntu users, however, might think things through a little differently.

Ahhh, choice, you gotta lub it.

That sounds backwards.

“… they [the developers] are doing it for themselves”

Then that would make them the user base and mean there is no issue, nor need to “open” any decisions up, right?