Linux and Main: Creating a Place for Users in the Open Source Process

Several months ago I witnessed a heated debate in the open
source community. The debate started here on the Linux and Main web
site with an article by Dennis Powell called ‘The Future Belongs to
GNOME; Inertia to KDE,’ in which he suggested that GNOME was
overtaking the KDE project by being more responsive to the user
community’s needs. It became obvious while reading the postings
that users do not have a place of their own in the open source
development process. I would like to respond to some of the ideas
I’ve seen posted and propose an outline for the proper relationship
between free software users and free software developers.

“Some posts have suggested that developers and users are
amorphous groups with a great deal of overlap. According to this
theory, users become developers as they acquire skill and gain
familiarity with software and developers become users as they lose
interest and stop submitting code on projects. The problem with
this view is that very few users have the skills needed to write
code. In fact, the only place this is true is among the developer
community itself. Developers of one application are users of other
applications and are in a unique position to contribute to those
projects by writing code for them. This is a nice situation when it
exists, but it should be recognized as the exceptional situation
that it is…”

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