FreeRunner delayed a further 6 months?!?!??

[Lally Singh]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 8:44 PM, Lally Singh <lally.singh at gmail.com> wrote:
>  Oh sheesh.  Why are you trying so hard to poison this project?
>
>  Read the rest of the response.  I said the proper response is "please
>  file a bug report."  Or shove it on a wishlist.  Someone spent time
>  trying to contribute to the project with their own ideas, and the last
>  thing you want to do is throw it back in their face.  At minimum,
>  you'll throw away a user, at worst, you've lost a significant
>  potential contributor.
>
>  The wish list can be 10 gigabytes long, that's fine.  As long as the
>  user's been brought a little into the fold, and suddenly we have a
>  bunch of nice little places for new developers to join in the project.
>   A wish list (or bug report list) and a "getting started with
>  developing for project X" is how you get people in.
>
>  Open source projects are even more dependent on marketing in their
>  day-to-day activities than regular commercial endeavors.  Nobody's
>  (usually) getting paid, nobody's *got* to do the work.  All you have
>  is making each other happy working together.


Yup, responding to my own post.  I've got more to say on this.
This'll be it for a while, I want to see how this community's going to
go without me dragging it kicking & screaming.

Growing up in a bunch of open-source projects, a developer has to
decide which ones to work with.  You can't work on every open source
project you use daily -- there are literally hundreds we touch as we
go.  Instead, we pick and choose.  How?  Two criteria:
1. The project itself.
2. The community.

If the community's really friendly and invites you in, you're more
likely to contribute.  If they reply to your inquries with a bunch of
RTFM, Write it yourself, or (what the rest really are saying) f*ck
off, then you're not going to go near them.

The "build it and they will come" mentality *DOES*NOT*WORK*.  I'll
remind you it came from a Kevin Costner movie, which really proves my
point.  You have to fight for every user.  The nice part is, you only
have to be nice and helpful... Things good leaders are anyway.

If I get a few more of these well-poisoning messages I'm out -- my
efforts here would be wasted as the community would never go anywhere.
 If people step up and actually try to build a real community, I'm in.
 I think there are more than a few others who feel the same way.

-- 
H. Lally Singh
Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science
Virginia Tech