:A response to "free software major league or minor?": Unjustified dismissal?
A response to "free software major league or minor?": Unjustified dismissal? Nov 11, 2009, 06 :03 UTC (0 Talkback[s]) (1261 reads) (Other stories by Sam Tuke)
"“What I hope is that there is a way to make a system that responds better to end user needs — probably by increasing the ways that end user values can be communicated”
"I hope this too, but lets not forget that there is very likely already more voluminous, frequent, and high quality dialogue between Free Software end users and developers than in any large scale software project on earth. Your statement sounds like this communication problem is unique to FOSS, and that it is a particularly pernicious problem for the community. I don’t believe that this is so, and in my view the current level of organisation of interaction in the most important projects is already an incredible achievement of technology and collaboration. Look at launchpad, for instance (now GPL) - every aspect of development of an application like Inkscape is public and interactive to users, from bugs to release schedules, to blueprints of features, to translations, to feature requests and more. This is a level of project management and user dialogue that I have never heard of in any non FOSS application, so lets not generalise the issue of communication to make it into a unique and crippling problem for FOSS - the situation is building upon existing achievements day by day and already exceeds what the commercial sector can match."
