I have been wondering recently whether Free Software communities without a *good* “benevolent dictator” eventually reach a critical mass and implode. I’m not sure, but it’s a thesis worth considering – projects or user groups who get so self-involved that they lose sight of the greater world, and eventually fade out of existence.
There are a few historical examples of this, notably mailing lists and IRC channels (I remember when #linpeople on openprojects was *the* place to go for pretty much any Linux configuration problem, it is now low-level chat). This is inspired by #debian’s dishonourable mention in the LinuxJournal poll in the “bad neighbour” section – the free software/open source member who walks the walk but doesn’t talk the talk.
A few examples of projects that have dangerously walked the like, and eventually either pulled up their socks and re-concentrated on a high-quality user experience – not just with the application, but more importantly in community interraction – or were superceded by a group/project which did are MPlayer (still precariously attached to their old reputation) and sodipodi.
I worry sometimes that the GIMP as a project is in danger of becoming irrelevant too. In general, user’s experiences in the GIMP community are negative, because of a perception that we set the friendliness bar too low, and the technical bar too high. There are lots of mailing list, IRC and bugzilla exchanges where users are expected to read lots of docs, and “inform themselves” before contributing, and often the replies are a little too curt for my liking. I love the GIMP, but sometimes it is very frustrating to see the comments that new contributers get from some people who are established.
Another thing that got me thinking about this was the recent thread on g-d-d about whether there should be an MP3 profile in SJ – I don’t know what an audio profile is, and I haven’t ever owned a CD recorder, so I haven’t used SJ yet, but it seems obvious to me that most users want to write MP3s. Encouraging use of Oggs by making writing MP3s difficult isn’t making things easy for users, who surely are the people you want to make happy… Ideally, you would (similar to other applications) make writing MP3s easy, but have writing oggs be trivial, and the default.
Does free software need to stay friendly to stay relevant, or is a barrier to entry a reasonable way to raise the SNR on community forums, freeing up developers for the “hard” questions?
I’m meandering… but it’s food for thought.
