IRC conversation with Mirko from the Paroli team

Eldon Koyle ekoyle at gmail.com
Thu Mar 12 21:51:47 CET 2009


<rant>
Openmoko (the company) doesn't have any responsibility to be open to the
community.  I personally do appreciate when they are, but I can see why
they might want to be a little more closed.  I think a lot of time is
spent arguing with community members over things that aren't extremely
important in the long-term.

When it comes right down to it, there is no reason for them to tell us
everything that is going on.  Let them make their design decisions so
that they can make better use of their time in accomplishing their
goals, whatever they may be.  Chances are you won't agree with some of
their design goals.  They can't please everyone, so they shouldn't try
to.  The beauty of open source is that you can change it however you
want.  If you disagree strongly enough, you make a fork or write
something yourself.

Companies involved in open source projects aren't involved solely for
the sake of open source (although they are usually very good
contributors).  They have goals they are trying to accomplish -- like
finally getting a usable software stack for a phone.  They also have to
make money somewhere.

If by saving the effort of communicating with everyone who thinks it
should be their business is allowing them to spend more time making a
usable set of applications, more power to them.  They are still giving
you the source, and if you don't like something I'm sure patches are quite
welcome.

Look at what happens every time a hardware-related (ie. gta03) post
occurs on this list: there is a very strong split between people who
want mutually-exclusive features, followed by a lot of arguing about
which is better, when it really comes down to a matter of preference
(the resistive vs. capacitive argument reminds me a lot of the
stereotypical vim vs. emacs comparison which is guaranteed to start a
flamewar on any LUG mailing list).

</rant>

-- 
Eldon Koyle




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