IRC conversation with Mirko from the Paroli team

George Brooke solar.george at googlemail.com
Thu Mar 12 23:23:08 CET 2009


On Thursday 12 March 2009 20:51:47 Eldon Koyle wrote:
> <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>
Thank you very much someone needed to say something along those lines.

solar.george
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