Re: Kickstarter was not successful... but it did help things...

[Doc O'Leary]

In article <mailman.6997.1385320793.10748.discuss-gnustep@gnu.org>,
 Ivan Vuãica <ivan@vucica.net> wrote:

> without getting deeper into discussion, and without disagreeing with either
> Riccardo or you, and not even thinking gnustep.org is at the exact place
> where it should be, I would highly advise you to take your own advice into
> account as well. It is not good to be so negative and so irritated at what
> you perceive as bad things in GNUstep's presentation.

No, what is *not* good is being unwilling to discuss or disagree.  
That's a great way to *not* make things better.  The only "negativity" I 
see here is the projection of false positivity.  I'm calling for changes 
I think are for the better.  Either you agree or you accept the status 
quo.  Pick a side and make your case.  

> Advice only gets projects so far. The hard part is actually contributing
> (which I have humbly learned during all of my clumsy attempts to do so
> wherever I truly tried to make a difference).

No, actually contributing is relatively easy.  What is *not* easy is 
getting people with vested interests to accept changes.  I'm seldom 
willing to fight bad management when I'm being *paid* to work; I sure 
don't want to fill my free time doing the same thing.

> There is little point in trying to move a mountain. Move a single rock,
> then move the next one, then move the next one.

People should not behave like rocks.  If they don't want to move 
themselves, I'm not going to go out of my way to put in the effort to 
move them.

> Eric made some awesome themes. Riccardo is already moving the site in a
> positive direction. (A few months ago I have myself had comments on the
> site which were outdated; Riccardo implemented the fixes.) Last year I have
> worked on Core Animation, and this year on a Opal (Core Graphics) backend.
> People are working on session managers.

And yet I go to the GNUstep site and see very little coherence of 
message or timely information.  I mean, the Developers > tasks link is 
full of old, open issues that "Should Be Finished" upwards of decade ago:

https://savannah.gnu.org/task/?group_id=99

There are countless issues like that which need to be addressed at a 
fundamental level by the leadership of the GNUstep project.  This is not 
a little fringe issue that can be fixed by someone spending some time on 
a marginalized site redesign.

> Feel free to contribute solutions for your desires where GNUstep should
> move next. Based on my past contributions, you can see that I agree with
> the assessment that it would be interesting to see compatibility with some
> iOS UI APIs. Based on my past contributions, I can assure you that it's far
> harder than it may look... if you want to do it right, in a compatible
> manner, with as little bugs as possible.

Your perspective is all wrong.  Your focus is on the implementation when 
it should be at a higher level.  Abstractly, iOS simply marks the 
biggest increase in interest in ObjC (and Cocoa in particular) in at 
least a decade.  For GNUstep to not capitalize on that is downright 
stupid!  It doesn't *necessarily* mean chasing Apple's UIKit 
implementation.  It *does* mean having a coherent message that connects 
with people, be they developers or users, and that is especially true if 
it seeks crowd-funding from the likes of Kickstarter.

-- 
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