Rudeness on gimp devel and bugzilla
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| Rudeness on gimp devel and bugzilla | William Skaggs | 21 Mar 21:45 |
| mailman.46677.1174410090.16... | 07 Oct 20:25 | |
| Rudeness on gimp devel and bugzilla | Martin Nordholts | 20 Mar 19:36 |
| Rudeness on gimp devel and bugzilla | Manish Singh | 20 Mar 19:52 |
| Rudeness on gimp devel and bugzilla | Martin Nordholts | 20 Mar 23:34 |
| Rudeness on gimp devel and bugzilla | Martin Nordholts | 21 Mar 08:00 |
| Rudeness on gimp devel and bugzilla | Manish Singh | 21 Mar 18:41 |
| Rudeness on gimp devel and bugzilla | Raphaël Quinet | 21 Mar 19:54 |
| Rudeness on gimp devel and bugzilla | Sven Neumann | 21 Mar 21:27 |
Rudeness on gimp devel and bugzilla
I really would like to add my point of view to this discussion, sorry for messing up threading (I had daily digests until just now)
I understand the reply was not in any way meant to be offensive mitch, but I, as I have stated before on IRC, also think that not very rarely replies to people who might want to contribute to GIMP has been a bit too rude.
I really can't possibly see why it would be sane to reply to someone that asks how GIMP works that "look it up for yourself".
We have used computer for decades, of course we could look this up for an to us unknown project in a couple of minutes.
But that is not relevant, what is relevant is to atract as many people as possible to the GIMP developers, and we will not succeed if we answer questions with "look it up for yourself".
Some come with the argument "well we don't want to answer stupid questions". Fine, you don't have to, but why do you have to act in a way that risks scaring possible new contributors away?
GIMP is a widely used piece of software, if one compares to other pieces of FLOSS, there are often many more contributors at other, similar projects. Doesn't anyone find that strange?
I can relate to my self, my first experiences with the GIMP devs were very rude, I was trying to help and came to the IRC channel to ask a couple of questions and getting acquinted with the people there, only to find out that I was being called "stupid" (yes, that was the word). That almost made me think "fuck the GIMP devs", well I actually did think that way because I didnt give a shit for a couple of months, until I decided to give it another go.
Basicaly the main reason I contribute to GIMP is because of GIMP, and not because I felt I was wanted, now that I have doing a bit of work I notice a GREAT difference in the way I am treated, if new people were treated in the same way, I think we would have made great progress at getting new contributors.
I really think it is sad that there isn't more active contributors, because to me that shows the rudeness have been going on for quite a while, otherwise there would be far more contributors. This last paragraph is of course just guessing...
Martin Nordholts
On Mon, 2007-03-19 at 23:35 -0300, Joao S. O. Bueno Calligaris wrote:
It is not really hard - and that is to you Mitch, you Sven, you Nomis, to simply rememebr the person on the other sidee is sitll a human being, is not it? Not less human for having less abilities to compile/hack complicated software projects, much less for simply not knowing how to do so.
Come on, that is simply a rude accusation. Definitely more rude than giving a small "check for yourself" to a question that clearly shows that the person did not do the slightest bit of work by itself.
I don't see the point in answering questions that are *trivial* for *everybody* to answer themselves, regardless of abilities or experience.
Yet each time such questions come up, somebody steps forward and answers them. That is simply no help at all for the person who asked the question. A "you can find out yourself trivially" is infinitely more helpful than doing the people's work for them.
whatever...
--mitch
Rudeness on gimp devel and bugzilla
On Tue, Mar 20, 2007 at 07:36:52PM +0100, Martin Nordholts wrote:
GIMP is a widely used piece of software, if one compares to other pieces of FLOSS, there are often many more contributors at other, similar projects. Doesn't anyone find that strange?
I don't believe this is true. Can you back this up with some evidence?
-Yosh
Rudeness on gimp devel and bugzilla
You're right, and I appologize for drawing hasty/wrong conclusions, my prejudices were wrong. Check out this awesome Ruby script though, it produces some rather interesting output nevertheless.
Martin
:Manish Singh skrev:
On Tue, Mar 20, 2007 at 07:36:52PM +0100, Martin Nordholts wrote:
GIMP is a widely used piece of software, if one compares to other pieces of FLOSS, there are often many more contributors at other, similar projects. Doesn't anyone find that strange?
I don't believe this is true. Can you back this up with some evidence?
-Yosh
Rudeness on gimp devel and bugzilla
Though, Inkscape I think seems to have succeeded better than both GIMP and Krita (attatching new and prettier script version)
Martin Nordholts
skrev:
You're right, and I appologize for drawing hasty/wrong conclusions, my prejudices were wrong. Check out this awesome Ruby script though, it produces some rather interesting output nevertheless.
Martin
:Manish Singh skrev:
On Tue, Mar 20, 2007 at 07:36:52PM +0100, Martin Nordholts wrote:
GIMP is a widely used piece of software, if one compares to other pieces of FLOSS, there are often many more contributors at other, similar projects. Doesn't anyone find that strange?
I don't believe this is true. Can you back this up with some evidence?
-Yosh
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rudeness on gimp devel and bugzilla
On Wed, Mar 21, 2007 at 08:00:42AM +0100, Martin Nordholts wrote:
Though, Inkscape I think seems to have succeeded better than both GIMP and Krita (attatching new and prettier script version)
Yeah, but not by much. The point being, pretty much all free software projects could use more contributors, and I don't think perceived rudeness is the primary cause of this. The Linux kernel folks are far ruder than anything that's happened on this list, but the number of contributors is in the thousands.
-Yosh
Rudeness on gimp devel and bugzilla
On Wed, 21 Mar 2007 10:41:48 -0700, Manish Singh wrote:
On Wed, Mar 21, 2007 at 08:00:42AM +0100, Martin Nordholts wrote:
Though, Inkscape I think seems to have succeeded better than both GIMP and Krita (attatching new and prettier script version)
Yeah, but not by much. The point being, pretty much all free software projects could use more contributors, and I don't think perceived rudeness is the primary cause of this. The Linux kernel folks are far ruder than anything that's happened on this list, but the number of contributors is in the thousands.
We seem to have a rather bad reputation, though. Try the following totally unscientific exercise: associate the terms "gimp developers" or "gimp contributors" or "gimp hackers" or "gimp admins" (including the quotes) with words such as rude, arrogant, unfriendly, assholes and so on. Then count the number of pages that are found for each of these combinations using your favorite web or newsgroup search engine.
Continue this exercise by taking a random sample of these hits, checking how many of them actually accuse the developers of being rude versus how many are just accidental associations due to the fact that these terms appear on the same page but in different contexts. And adjust the total number of hits according to the proportion found in the random sample (the other option is to perform an exhaustive review of all hits - good luck with that).
Now that you have these unscientific numbers for GIMP, repeat the exercise for "Linux developers", "kernel developers", "GNOME developers", "Inkscape developers", and so on with Krita, KDE, Mozilla, OpenOffice... Of course these numbers have to be weighted according to the total number of hits without the derogative terms (e.g. "gimp developers" without "rude", etc.)
I did not waste too much time on this pointless exercise, but it looks like GIMP does have a bad reputation, as it comes first or second in the associations with "rude", "arrogant", "unfriendly", etc. The Linux kernel guys are a bit more rude and the GNOME developers are more arrogant (but not so rude nor unfriendly). But overall, GIMP scores rather high. It will probably take a long time to change that perception...
Note that I do not intend to continue this discussion nor to perform this silly exercise in depth. We have already discussed this long enough and I hope that we will all be a bit more careful when replying to questions or bug reports. For Bugzilla, I think that the general guideline would be to always thank the reporte, even if the bug report is not so good.
-Raphaël
Rudeness on gimp devel and bugzilla
Hi,
I don't think that comparing projects will give us a lot insight. It seems pretty clear to me that the main problem in GIMP development is our long development cycle. This makes users believe that the project would be stagnant and it takes a lot of fun out of the development. If someone contributes a new feature it takes years before it reaches our user base. And we are also going through long periods where we are more or less feature frozen. That keeps us from accepting contributions such as for example the Deskew plug-in which has been announced here recently.
On the other hand we have very high quality standards and that is also acknowledged. If we release something as stable, than it is really quite stable and polished. Bug reports are handled very fast, serious problems are usually fixed in at most a few days.
It remains to be seen if we can acomplish shorter development cycles and still provide high quality software with a backward compatible API.
Sven
Rudeness on gimp devel and bugzilla
What fun!
Curiosity piqued, I tried to do some quasi-controlled analysis, using the following method. For various values of "foo", I did a Google search for "foo developers rude" and then for "foo developers friendly", and computed the ratio of the number of hits, yielding the RQ or "rudeness quotient" for foo.
Here are the RQ's for a few foo's:
baseline (foo = ""): 0.064
SOFTWARE:
gimp: 0.314
photoshop: 0.411
gnome: 0.199
linux: 0.044
linux kernel: 0.212
kde: 0.160
inkscape: 0.006
krita: 0.021
blender 0.181
ORGANIZATIONS:
fsf: 0.392
microsoft: 0.067
adobe: 0.313
oracle: 0.206
ibm: 0.274
COUNTRIES:
american: 0.045
german: 0.243
canadian: 0.009
french: 0.116
indian: 0.114
finnish: 0.340
norwegian: 0.394
QUALITIES:
hacker: 0.571
brilliant: 0.791
elite: 0.769
incompetent: 0.344
stupid: 0.819
So it seems that the least rude are Inkscape developers and Canadians. The rudest are the "stupid" developers, followed closely by the "brilliant" ones.
-- Bill
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