Debian: contempt for "end user" values has to stop!"

[David Gerard]

2009/8/19 Samuel Thurston, III <sam.thurston at gmail.com>:
> On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 8:42 AM, Ray Leventhal<ubuntu at swhi.net> wrote:

>> The complaint that 'I'm not a developer, I can't do this' is hogwash.

> Is it? Do you think it's a good idea to have amateur coders
> spitballing package fixes to get things done?  One of the serious
> problems in software designs is that a bad start can make things
> horribly difficult to correct down the road.
> There are plenty of users of software that will run into problems that
> I would prefer to never see touch a programming language in their
> lives.  Heck, there are plenty of working programmers that I wish
> would put down the editor, go outside, and stay there.


http://eaves.ca/2009/07/28/remixing-angie-byron-to-create-the-next-million-mozillians/

The problem is how to get people who are in that tiny little intersection.

But *then* the problem is what to do when you have more of them than
you can deal with - the "Linus doesn't scale" problem. It'd be nice if
the only thing keeping them out was code quality, but it's silly to
claim that's all there is.

Wikipedia has much the same problem - that intersection, which is tiny
for software, is pretty much everyone who knows someone and can type
for a wiki. So hideously complex social structures have evolved to
deal with the distributed crapflood. Many of which are way less than
ideal and n00b-bite way too much.


- d.