you are a first class citizen
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| mbaehrlxer Aug 12, 2006 3:45 AM EDT |
quote: "A user is a second-class citizen. All of the bug reports in the world don't make you a contributor. You aren't really anyone in free software until you write code or contribute a bug fix." that is just plain wrong. being a member of a few projects, i consider any positive feedback about the project as a contribution. because i get a nice fuzzy feeling from it like: "oh there is someone who cares about our project and is contributing something". looking at all the things you wrote, makes me wish we had more contributors like you in our projects. quote: "Later, I found that there were lots of programs out there already written. It was a matter of finding the ones that worked for you, and if they didn't, you could encourage the developer to add new features." that is good, because writing a program that does something an an existing program doesn't get you noticed anyways. if i come accross one of these i usually think that's just another one of these people to lazy to first see if the problem isn't already solved. quote: "I must learn how to program in a “real” computer language." times have changed from the days of forth, lisp and c. there are modern programming languages which are a lot easier to learn and use: pike and python are two good examples. both are easy enough to get you started in an afternoon. no need to invest much time. quote: "if I do write a program, won't others just ridicule my work as amateurish? Won't the program that I want to write already be out there and better implemented?" not if you first make sure that the program you want to write is not out there. but who says that you need to start from scratch? next time if you think about encuraging a developer to add a new feature, consider trying to add that feature yourself. that will get you started. greetings, eMBee. ps: i wanted to post this comment on freesoftwaremagazine.com, but that requires registration which is asking a ridicuouls amount of questions, that i do not want to answer, or that do not give me any reasonable choice |
| grouch Aug 12, 2006 5:53 AM EDT |
mbaehrlxer: All good points. I recall a young lady who was the only female in the CS department at her university. She didn't think much of her programming skills, but wrote a little program to solve quadratic equations for a school teacher in her area. The teacher was ecstatic and passed the program around. It saved a very significant amount of money for that school system. Feedback from the teachers caused her to port the program to MS Windows. The teachers were amazed that what she provided freely (under the GPL) was more useful to them in class than what they had been trying to raise money to license. |
| devnet Aug 12, 2006 7:43 PM EDT |
I'd say being female isn't the case either. I feel left out a lot because I don't make technical decisions or take part in technical decisions of PCLinuxOS despite leading a community project site for it and developing 3 user guides and maintaining the official wiki for it. But I also realize that I don't know squat about programming in perl, Qt, or python. I can't program to save my life...I can bash script a bit but that's my limit. So, I accept this position and roll with it. Thus, my name is VERY well known in the PCLinuxOS community. I didn't desire this...it's a byproduct of being active in the community. One's goals in free software shouldn't be to get the glory and be on the cover of some magazine. It should be to write programs/do bug reports/document for the sake of doing it and to proliferate open source. Period. I'd say the author is frustrated...but selfishly frustrated...which can never be good. When I started working on IRC scripting in 1993 and working on a script program called IRC-Dragon, I worked with 6 other individuals to bug test, function test, and to design artwork (ASCII) for it. What I didn't know at the time was that 2 of these individuals were women. Funny thing is...it didn't matter to me one way or the other. That's the way it should be now. If we could exist and work on programs/apps/distros without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias, without sex, without preference or leaning toward one political stance...if we could just exist as a name. Just a name that could be added as part of the team. Part of the team that finished the job and released the app/distro/program. Part of the movement. Part of the source. |
| dinotrac Aug 13, 2006 4:59 AM EDT |
> feel left out a lot because I don't make technical decisions or take part in technical decisions of PCLinuxOS despite leading a community project site for it and developing 3 user guides and maintaining the official wiki for it. I consider that to be a problem in software development, but it is not limited to free software by any stretch of the imagination. If anything, the open nature of free software makes it a smaller problem than faced by the closed software world. The specific problem as I see it, is that technical problems do not take place in a vacuum - ie, there is rarely such a thing as a "pure" engineering question. Everything has a trade-off of one kind or another. In typical development, some sort of requirements are drawn up in some sort of detail ( or not ;0) ) and passed on to the people doing the development. In the course of making technical decisions, developers might or might not consult the requirements drafters with questions, who, in turn, might or might not consult the relevant party of interest. The answer usually seems to be "might not" and technical decisions are made that affect the acceptability of the end product to its target users with no feedback, adding a seeming random effect to the likelihood of success. Only seemingly random, of course, because, in the absence of an effective feedback loop, the decisions will be made in the developers' own interest. |
| dcparris Aug 13, 2006 8:50 PM EDT |
> When I started working on IRC scripting in 1993 and working on a script program called IRC-Dragon, I worked with 6 other individuals to bug test, function test, and to design artwork (ASCII) for it. What I didn't know at the time was that 2 of these individuals were women. Funny thing is...it didn't matter to me one way or the other. Well here's an important point, devnet. I've chatted with an asian person interested in GNU/Linux. It turns out "he" is a "she". I just assumed... Oops! Anyway, it really shouldn't matter whether the code is written by a man, woman, or by some specific social demographic. The question to ask is the same question any business needs to ask of a job candidate - can they ge the job done, and do it well? I do know that there are still some guys out there who could use a ride on the cluetrain, where working with women is concerned. |
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