{"id":1272,"date":"2007-09-26T14:55:13","date_gmt":"2007-09-26T12:55:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/2007\/09\/on-recent-anti-kde-blogs\/"},"modified":"2007-09-26T14:55:13","modified_gmt":"2007-09-26T12:55:13","slug":"on-recent-anti-kde-blogs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/2007\/09\/on-recent-anti-kde-blogs\/","title":{"rendered":"On recent Anti-KDE blogs."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Being an avid reader of blogs in the Free Software world, and especially in the Free Desktop<br \/>\n        world, lately, I see there is an increased amount of blogs that try to put KDE in a bad light.<br \/>\n        <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.gnome.org\/iain\/2007\/09\/24\/my-voyage-of-discovery\/\">Today&#8217;s example<\/a> on<br \/>\n        <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.gnome.org\/iain\">Iain Holmes blog<\/a> made me realise that it&#8217;s time to<br \/>\n        publicly ask people to stop exhibiting this pattern in the public.<\/p>\n<p \/>\n        This kind of sidekicking other Free Software projects puts <strong>you<\/strong> and the<br \/>\n        community (GNOME in this case, but it universally also applies to KDE, the Freedesktop and the<br \/>\n        Free Software community) <strong>as a whole<\/strong> in bad light. While it&#8217;s probably fine to<br \/>\n        make an ass out of yourself, please don&#8217;t apply the same logic to others. Therefore, if you<br \/>\n        consider bitching about <em>The Other Desktop<\/em> (be it KDE, GNOME or whoever else&#8217;s offering) in<br \/>\n        public forums, please keep the following in mind (and don&#8217;t expect me to list new things here):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Trying to ridicule other Free Software people&#8217;s work is counter-productive to<br \/>\n            the cause of getting more people to use Free Software.<\/li>\n<li>Stating bad things and forgetting about the background for convenience reasons shows<br \/>\n            only one thing well: You&#8217;re too narrow-minded to see the big picture, and you don&#8217;t do any<br \/>\n            effort to try to really understand the thing you&#8217;re bitching about. In 99.9% of the cases,<br \/>\n            the world is not as black-and-white as you are so conveniently trying to put it.<\/li>\n<li>It also puts your community into bad light, and it makes collaborating for those who<br \/>\n            are less narrow-minded much harder. Don&#8217;t throw sticks between your own people&#8217;s legs.<\/li>\n<li>It doesn&#8217;t help the adoption of Free Software and the Free Desktop <strong>at all<\/strong>,<br \/>\n            in fact, it shows that you&#8217;re immature.<\/li>\n<li>It might provoke the same kind of reaction from the other side, leading to a vicious circle<br \/>\n            of mud-slingering with the consequences I&#8217;m outlining in this post.<\/li>\n<li>Diversity is one of the principles of Free Software, your pattern of behaviour shows a deep<br \/>\n            lack of understanding of this concept.<\/li>\n<li>Remember what today might be a funny and smart post, it can be tomorrow&#8217;s reason for an employer<br \/>\n            to not consider your application because of a lack of vision, understanding and diplomacy in dealing with<br \/>\n            diversity. (Replace &#8220;employer&#8221; with &#8220;potential girl-friend&#8221; at will.) Don&#8217;t shoot yourself in the<br \/>\n            foot.<\/li>\n<li>The Free Software cause is best served by being open-minded, collaborating with each other and<br \/>\n            being honest and positive about your own and other&#8217;s achievements.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>        Those who look behind this kind of posts wonder about the real reasons for this<br \/>\n        immature and harmful behaviour. My personal guess is that there&#8217;s a fear of others outrunning your<br \/>\n        pace of innovation (which is absolutely normal in competitive innovation, sometimes A leads,<br \/>\n        sometimes B does, in total both win in terms of speeds compared to being the only player).<br \/>\n        Then, there&#8217;s an uncertainty how to cope with this in a collaborative fashion (there&#8217;s a lot of<br \/>\n        potentially shared technology in KDE4, you know?). The net result is doubt for those who<br \/>\n        consider trying a Free Desktop &#8212; they&#8217;ll just wait until the community shows it&#8217;s mature and<br \/>\n        working as one on a good user experience.<br \/>\n        That&#8217;s the people you&#8217;re scaring away, yet it&#8217;s by far largest part of the desktop market. Remember,<br \/>\n        there&#8217;s <strong>one<\/strong> vendor monopolising the market, by concentrating your effort on<br \/>\n        the other Free Desktop, you&#8217;re trying to fight for a 3% &#8211; 6% slice of the market (which probably<br \/>\n        aligns much better with your offering, and thereby it has much less of a competitive advantage.<br \/>\n        That is &#8220;interesting&#8221;, &#8220;unique&#8221; and &#8220;challenged&#8221;, but probably not very &#8220;smart&#8221; from a marketing<br \/>\n        point of view.).<\/p>\n<p \/>\n        So here&#8217;s my call to weapons:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n            People of the Free Software community, discourage this kind of counter-productive behaviour<br \/>\n            and fight for a wide community of freedom-lovers that grows beyond trying to downplay other&#8217;s<br \/>\n            achievements.\n        <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p \/>On a positive note, I <strong>do<\/strong> know that this kind of behaviour is not the common<br \/>\n        case in either community. In fact, I&#8217;ve worked together really well with people from other Free<br \/>\n        Software projects (including GNOME) in the recent past. Unfortunately, only bad news is news, so<br \/>\n        this is what gets picked up by the media. And unfortunately, it needs a lot of people not peeing<br \/>\n        in the pool to see a pattern of a nice bunch to make up for one rotten apple.<\/p>\n<p \/>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Being an avid reader of blogs in the Free Software world, and especially in the Free Desktop world, lately, I see there is an increased amount of blogs that try to put KDE in a bad light. Today&#8217;s example on Iain Holmes blog made me realise that it&#8217;s time to publicly ask people to stop&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/2007\/09\/on-recent-anti-kde-blogs\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">On recent Anti-KDE blogs.<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\" aria-hidden=\"true\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kde"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1272\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}