Re: Done

[Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org>]

On Sat, 13 Sep 2003 14:40:40 +0100, Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> said: 

> On Fri, Sep 12, 2003 at 10:46:55AM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
>> I sincerely hope that the sentiment in the argument above is not
>> widely held. Because of this sentiment, though, I am reluctantly
>> beginning to come to the conclusion that there may be something of
>> substance in user complaints that debian developers are arrogantr,
>> novice unfriendly, and the distribution is one for steeped in
>> elitism.

> How far away is that, really, from holding the attitude you've often
> professed that developers work primarily to produce the best system
> for themselves, and that altruism is merely a biologically
> infeasible delusion? ;-) In my experience, such as it is, people who
> are unwilling or unable to follow up an inadequate package
> description and discover what it does are statistically less likely
> to be collaborative users, on the basis that only a limited
> proportion of novices end up collaborating, and therefore a strict
> approach of enlightened self-interest would seem to give their
> problems lower priority.


	You have a point here. However, I still like to think there is
 a  valid distinction, if one thinks through the enlightened self
 interest: one would like to foment a community where enhancements to
 a package are welcome, even if the developer does not think it is
 important; since then things important to me, but not to the
 developer, would tend to get changed, improving my utility.  About
 the best way to incubate such an attitude is to adopt it, since do as
 I do gathers more momentum than do as I say.

	Secondly, I would like to posit that the assumption that
 novices are unlikely to be effective collaborators, while certainly
 true on the surface, has this underlying flaw: all future
 collaborators start out as novices; and if we adopt policies that
 turn some of them off the free software community, we reduces the
 pool of helpers in the future.

	Thirdly, novices tend to notice flaws and lacunae in basic
 design that more experienced users have become accustomed to; fixing
 novice complaints (customer complaints at work), and the resulting
 redesign and refactoring has often resulted in improved designs, and
 more streamlined products that improve usability even for the
 cognoscenti -- and have made my software more scalable.(I understand
 that improving the description may not result in such an
 improvement). 

	Finally, if the description is improved to make software more
 accessible to people, and there are more users for the package, the
 package may be used in combination with other tools in patterns the
 authors  themselves do not employ; and the resulting requests for
 enhancement for these loosely coupled packages would increase the
 synergy between them, and increase the utility of the system in ways
 unforeseen, and you may yourself need this increased functionality in
 the future.

	Or so I like to think.

> It seems a very small step behind enlightened self-interest to care
> only about problems that directly affect your own use of the system,
> which often leads to being unfriendly to novices. I prefer not to
> think about things that way myself.

	Yes. But the chain of logic that led one to publish the
 software in the first place, and polish it up for general use, and
 collaboration, and the possibility of yourself needing the quid pro
 quo (perhaps not from the same individual, but another member of the
 community one is trying to create). 

	manoj
-- 
"Ada is the work of an architect, not a computer scientist." Jean
Icbiah, inventor of Ada, weenie
Manoj Srivastava   <srivasta@debian.org>  <http://www.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/>
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