A response to “free software major league or minor?”: Unjustified dismissal?

““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.”

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