Abandon "Default Desktop"

Lennart Poettering mzerqung at 0pointer.de
Sat May 2 18:20:13 UTC 2009


On Sat, 02.05.09 19:57, Kevin Kofler (kevin.kofler at chello.at) wrote:

> * sweeping KDE under the carpet is not the way to attract more effort
> towards KDE. We need more manpower to be more active in upstream KDE
> development, not just packaging, but we aren't going to get that manpower
> if we place ourselves as a distribution hostile to KDE. We KDE SIG people
> have been fairly successful at fighting the historically-motivated
> suspicions of KDE people about Fedora, but GNOME bias in things like the
> download page or the way the desktop environment gets selected on the DVD
> can quickly lead to new bad blood flowing.

This is all the wrong way round. Don't misunderstand Fedora as nothing
but a vechicle to attract developers.

People join a project voluntarily only after they decided they love
the software and know it very well.  If someone reached that level he
is far beyond the point where the option that something gets installed
by default or not would hold him back.

It's naive to believe that just by installing something by default
you coul attract developers to it and get all outstanding issues get
fixed miraculously.

When you add something prominently in the default install you FIRST
need to make sure you have enough resources to support and develop it
further. Don't do it the other way round! And if the project you are
pushing is an alternative for something already available in the
default install then the bar is even higher and you need to have 
remotely similar manpower available than the other alterantive has.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4




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