Seth Nickell

I think you’re saying I am glossing the implementation phase.

I’m saying most of GNOME and free software development culture in general are glossing the conceptualization (aka idea generation, aka planning, aka big-D Design) phase.

They are both substantial, hard and, in the context of building *good* original software, both essential.

If you skip implementation you end up with NO software. If you skip conceptualization you end up with crappy software (or a clone, which is better than crappy software, but if Linux takes over the world and can only clone, then software will stop evolving and I will shoot myself… you can’t wake up one day and suddenly start inventing after a decade of copying). Unfortunately people seem to fall into two categories: either they skip conceptualization (pragmatists, Meyers-Briggs S’s) or they skip implementation (dreamers, Meyers-Briggs N’s). The people who have programmed the software stack we rely upon and are hence respected have, of course, tended to be pragmatists. The dominant culture that grew out of this has rightfully observed that crappy is better than nothing. Unfortunately, they have fallaciously extended this argument and decided that implementation is better than conceptualization.

Given a choice between one or the other, that is true. But they’re not mutually exclusive. To generate software that’s better than the status quo you NEED both… and both are difficult and substantial tasks that you need to work hard at.

With a big project that’s composed of lots of people, you can, in theory, have both. But in ecological terms, this does not often happen. Most open source projects start as a very small group of people, and given some success they grow larger. Unfortunately, people tend to hit it off with people who are “like them” so the dreamers tend to only work with dreamers, and the pragmatists tend to only work with pragmatists. Dreamer groups always die young because of course nothing is worse than crappy. Pragmatist groups like GNOME, by virtue of observing the failures of dreamers, develop a culture that is HOSTILE toward dreamers (and the only “dreamers” who stick around as a result are those that don’t have anything better to do than get shot down… namely loser dreamers… which only reinforces the feeling of the pragmatists that dreamers are a waste of air).