Re: Did GNOME go 1.0 too early?

[Jason Tackaberry <tack dok org>]

> I understand the wish to advocate and all, but these complaints are too
> much about whether or not the release is a good political move and not

The point to OSS is that it is immune to political pressure.  OSS developers
call their software 1.0 when they feel it's ready, and not a minute before
that.  Take E for example: it's been a DR for a bazillion years.  I think
it's probably complete enough to call 1.0, but raster doesn't.  He wants 1.0
to fall under his definition of complete, whatever that may be.  Perhaps
E is the other extreme: that is, instead of releasing 1.0 too early, he might
never release it at all.  Still, OSS isn't supposed to fall victim to the
same sorts of problems commercial software does.  OSS is peer reviewed; 
OSS is high quality; OSS should be publically released when the bugs are
minimal.  Maybe as Linux gets more and more commercialized, this is bound
to change.  

I'm not convinced that another month or two of bug fixing and smoothing the
jagged edges out would not have been the best thing to do.  I realize that
announcing Gnome 1.0 during LinuxExpo is good for publicity, but do we really
want to focus attention to buggy software?

Feature-wise, Gnome is near perfect for a 1.0.  But IMO, the nasty bugs that
are in it now should be enough to have kept it from going 1.0.

> enough about the fact that this release will cause GNOME to get better
> faster.

I'm not convinced of this.  The majority of the mostly users who are likely to
help make GNOME better (i.e. those who will suggest features and submit bug
reports) are probably using GNOME now.  I'd say the users who will try Gnome
1.0 are those who, after a few crashes, will not bother with it anymore,
let alone submit bug reports.


Of course, this whole thread is kind of moot.  GNOME is 1.0 now and there's not
much we can do about it except ride the wave and see where it takes us.  (It
should be very interesting, at least.)  The original intent of my post was to
see what the GNOME developers thought about this release.  Havoc replied to a
message in this thread, but he talked about something else.  I need the GNOME
developers to ooze their confidence on me so that I can sleep at night. :)

Regards,
Jason.