[openmoko-announce] Openmoko on Design

[arne anka]

> If you need a benevolent dictator to lead, why not become one yourself?
> If you need standards why not make them? This is not a responsibility
> of the Openmoko team. They already gave us the damn thing to build it
> all on. This really is the job of the community. Stop whining and start
> doing the job yourself if you want it done. It's no one else's
> responsibility.

sorry, but that's imho part of the responsibility of om -- if i don't liek  
i don't need to use it but why should i (and everyone else) invent taht  
kind of stuff?
distributors like debian/suse/redhat/... even gentoo create distributions  
so you don't need to worry about all that tedious stuff like installing,  
updating, uninstalling, keeping track of files, creating config files and  
so on.
most users of linux do not use it because the want to create their system  
 from scratch -- the are happy that someone organizes things that need to  
be taken care of and the adjust or modify where needed.

basically the same thing is it i was expecting from om.
i was hoping that these decisions  where made already and i had not to  
care about them -- i am, like probably the most of us, rather  
application-oriented, and i want to focus on managing existing  
applications and -- hopefully in a near future -- developing my own, using  
firm foundations.

those foundations do in no way harm the freedom to create a completely  
different kind of managing the freerunner, like the pure existence of  
debian or slackware didn't hinder the creation and growing up of mandrake,  
suse or redhat.
but the _user_ had a distribution to work with.

i read seans mail rather as a polite way to say "we're pissed off by all  
this criticism".
well, as a ceo of om he can't be that frank as jay or marcus bauer from  
tangogps, but certainly he has a point here.
otoh the hair raising issue of the root login or the thread regarding the  
keyboard toggle of asu prove that those being critical have valid points,  
too.

after all, we're now (imo) at the usual point with projects being so  
overeloaded with ideas and imagination:
people see the realy thing and realize that a lot of high hopes are far  
 from reality -- adapting to these new facts is a lengthy process with a  
lot of criticism until the vision and reality match.
i can fully understand that people like jay, knowing the neo1973 and  
hoping for the fr to fix a lot of shortcomings, _are_ annoyed, in  
particular when they get the impression that everything they say dies away  
unheard.