On Wed, Oct 08, 2003 at 10:02:46AM -0700, Mark Knecht wrote: > This Linux world is completely different. No one is going to *make* Paul, > Taybin, Jesse, Steve, Chris, Guillaume or Rich do anything. (Or the 500 > other people I haven't mentioned.) They get to create the vision they have, > and then we users get to use it if we want to. True, but not a complete description. As a user, you have direct contact via email and mailing lists with all of these developers. And while they are perfectly free to ignore you, there is a cultural bias in the free software world in favor of being responsive to one's user communty :-) Remember that no one is going to *make* Steinberg, Digidesign, etc etc do anything either. They have a vested interest in giving you enough of what you want that you keep coming back for more; but if you need something that isn't a popular feature you're out of luck and it is impossible to do anything about it. At least with free software there is a chance that you can find somebody to help you get what you need. I was once on a very active user group for a Yamaha sampler that I owned. We collected a detailed list of features and improvements we'd like to see in a revised version of the ROM for the sampler. Some of these were extravagant, but some were quite simple useability enhancements that should not have been technically difficult at all. We managed to get in touch with some people at Yamaha. They basically told us we were out of luck, but if we'd like about a quarter of the fixes on our list, we could always fork over twice as much money for the replacement device they were coming out with, which would probably never do everything we wanted either, and would probably have a similar lifecycle: get some of what you want... expensive upgrade which *removes* some of your favorite features while adding others... repeat infinitely. Thank god free software doesn't work that way. > It's a great model when it > works, and I think it often does, but not always, and not so far in all > areas. Sure. The major limiting factor is developer time. -- Paul Winkler http://www.slinkp.com Look! Up in the sky! It's MICRO-MEGATON BEER MONKEY! (random hero from isometric.spaceninja.com)
