Callum Lerwick wrote:
On Fri, 2008-02-29 at 13:03 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
Callum Lerwick wrote:
I'm a Software Engineer. I believe my time is best spent making
Fedora and Open Source in general, better. A better system will sell
itself.
Hmmm, then why are all those boxes running windows?
Is this a troll? Yeah yeah, its idealistic engineer thinking. I
considered saying "A better product will... well, it's easier to sell."
but that wouldn't have sounded as epic. :)
A better question would be whether it is to promote what you happen to
have, or to learn what users would like to have. There are a lot of
things that could be better in a distribution simply by combining
features that are already available in upstream packages. For example,
fedora ships an LDAP server and has the capability of using one for user
authentication, but no one does - and the value of doing it isn't
obvious until you install your second box. Why couldn't these be
shipped to work together and be the default way to manage users even on
a single box?
Users want ponies, and there's no lack of them coming on fedora-devel to
tell us so. My point here is I see no lack of communication between
Fedora developers and users. There's this and other mailing lists, IRC,
and forums such as fedoraforum.org, all of which are frequented by at
least some developers and/or ambassadors. Ambassadors are in direct
contact with user communities. Many developers are in direct contact
with users. They have day jobs as IT people at universities, or research
institutions... Red Hat of course has its customers. And developers are
users too.
I see no problem that needs to be fixed. (Yes, more engineer thinking.)
Why give our users a hollow, meaningless vote? We'd be lying to them.
What are we, a United States presidential election? :)
I don't see anyone approaching this from a marketing perspective.
Yes, there are channels to get to developers, and yes they are used more
or less effectively, but look at the experience: You want something
done, so you go to fedora, and you are linked to a shiny blue website.
It intros with a long string of "motherhood and apple pie" speak about
collaboration and working together to make fedora better for all of us.
Then you post your idea in a nice little template, and collect your
thank you for making the world a better place as you log out.
Making the users feel special is a good objective too, in addition to
listening to what they want. Also, making this sharing very public turns
the collaboration itself into a kind of advertisement. Others who
stumble upon the site get to say "hey, look how collaborative Fedora is.
I should check this out."
Even if little to no new ideas are reaped from the process, it still
makes people happy.
--CJD
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