On Sun, 2013-04-14 at 20:53 -0400, Hashem Nasarat wrote:
[...]Sriram, while I agree many problems would be alleviated with more volunteer time, I've witnessed multiple instances in the past 6 months where decisions were not made democratically, despite a clear lack of consensus. Most recently, there were a great deal of changes to the gnome-shell "All Applications" view very late in the 3.8 schedule, well after code freeze, and despite visible disagreement. Loomio seems to offer an intuitive way of seeing how controversial a change is.
"If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse" -- Henry Ford [1] Software development is not a democracy. Decisions are taken by people who actually develop the software. Comments might or might not be welcomed depending of several factors (politeness, pertinence, reputation, data, etc.). Some decisions have proven better with the time, some others don't and get fixed (or tried a different path). In the development cycle there are plenty of opinions of people (including developers) who have not tried them. Some of them are still valuable, but without real data (not anecdotes) is hard to convince anybody and require to make a good case. At the end of the day, you have to convince people doing the work, who also are actual users of what they develop. [1] Although there does not seem evidence he really said that, you get the point. Another example you can find it http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/no-smartphones/ -- Germán Poo-Caamaño http://calcifer.org/
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