[ubuntu-art] What are we doing?

[Сергей]

I think I know why this is happening.
It seems to me that Canonical design team forgot about the Cathedral
and the Bazaar, or just got the Not Invented Here syndrome, and this
makes all community efforts useless. Remember the boot experience
redesign initiative in Karmic. There were loads of great boot splash
designs in Artwork/Incoming/Boot. In Lucid dev team introduced
Plymouth, where everything suggested for Karmic was possible, and what
we got?! An plain splash which would work in USplash (Hardy - Karmic
bootsplash engine) much better - it would appear on time, have a
working progressbar and there would be no ugly fallbacks to text mode.
Why use Plymouth then if it's better with USplash? OK, if you really
want to use Plymouth, use a 100% Self Made, but plain and ugly splash
for it? You've already got great mockups. Just pick the best one and
tell the community to implement it. In a few weeks you'll have a
perfect implementation created and tested by the community. Remember
the Cathedral and the Bazaar?
Now remember GDM decorations in Lucid. That thing is the most plain
login screen I ever seen! I remember some Canonical designer mentioned
that they didn't have enough time to design a good one - I don't
remember was it on this list or not, but that's unimportant. If they
realized that they won't make good one on time, why didn't they get
the community involved? Again, they had lots of great mockups from
Karmic. And again, lots of work was wasted, and Canonical again used
the 100% Self Made, but absolutely plain artwork. Will anybody in the
community want to do waste their effort on that again?
What's the difference between the design team and the community in
terms of creative potential? In any team it's limited. In a community
of a project like Ubuntu it's virtually unlimited. A team can't beat
the rest of the world, they must understand this! And if design team
doesn't eradicate all this cathedral stuff and switch to bazaar as
soon as possible, this list and all community efforts will remain
absolutely useless!!