http://journal.gnome.org/article/46/the-gnome-community-end-users

I have tried to “do my community duty” and report bugs, and I still do. However, whether it’s a cosmetic bug or a kernel panic, they bugs rarely even get an acknowledgement (let alone a fix).

This isn’t a rant; I’ve been a developer for over 30 years, and I understand the issues of triage and resource limits. However, looking from the perspective of and end-user that goes to the effort to find the bug reporting tool and actually files a bug, the processes is intractable.

Mailing lists and IRC channels don’t exist. If the interaction doesn’t occur in a web-based forum, it isn’t going to happen. It’s not that people are happy with the situation, it’s that they are not interested in learning what they see as archaic communication techniques. It’s the reason we don’t send smoke signals when we want to go to lunch with a friend, or use Morse code when we want to chat with our aunt across the country. By clinging to these old user-unfriendly technologies, projects intentially alienate users and set the bar – you must “learn this much” to talk to us.

That’s OK, if that’s the intent, but I keep seeing projects ask why users don’t interact more with the community. It’s almost as if the developer community is psychotic in some rspects.

1. It’s often difficult for someone unfamiliar with Gnome or Ubuntu to find the right place (usually a mailing list) to ask questions. bug-buddy is not a support tool.
2. Many people are easily intimidated and afraid of looking stupid on an official project forum.
3. People following the “blessed” community policies _still_ get ignored. See, for example, the beginning of this rant: http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html:

“This is, I think, the most common way for my bug reports to open source software projects to ever become closed. I report bugs; they go unread for a year, sometimes two; and then (surprise!) that module is rewritten from scratch — and the new maintainer can’t be bothered to check whether his new version has actually solved any of the known problems that existed in the previous version.”

None of this may apply to Swfdec, but it certainly does to much of Gnome (or Ubuntu) in general.

So the question is: How do we scale the distros?

An early concern with Ubuntu was the loss of users from Debian. What actually happened was that Ubuntu picked off the less technical users, and then built a community around the forums, and ultimately commercial support through Canonical.

(obDisclosure: I was the one who started the support department at Canonical)

It would be interesting to look at the other popular distros and do an analysis on how they would handle growth.

Tsk, tsk.