Voting considered harmful (Was: Re: Echo Icon Theme in F10?)

[David Zeuthen]

On Mon, 2008-10-13 at 17:03 +0000, Martin Sourada wrote:
> to ask you now is the preferred way to decide upon it. Should we hold a
> irc meeting, do a mail vote, set up a vote in the fedora voting system,
> other way? 

I know I'm ranting in the wrong forum (but anyone should feel free to
forward it to the Fedora board or whatever powers that be), but, FFS,
can we please get away from this voting business? It's a disease.

Consider what happened if we started voting on what patches should go in
tarballs? Or what the dialogs in your desktop looked like? Or what
options to use by default. Or what IO scheduler to use in the kernel.

IMNSHO, voting is making Fedora turn into something mediocre that I, for
one, really don't want to work on, much less rant about. Heck, I'd be
running Debian if I wanted something like this.

The fact that you are proposing a vote only shows there's a tremendous
problem in Fedora. You guys hanging out on fedora-art-list that is
interested in the visual of the desktop _really_ _really_ need to grow
up and work with upstream projects instead of sitting in your own little
Fedora cube disconnected from the rest of the world. With your stupid
voting system.

If you think what you're doing is "value add" that makes Fedora look
better than the "competition" you are wrong. If you grasped what free
software / culture is _really_ about you'd know already that it's about
working together to deliver great value that can be maintained and
improved by something larger than yourselves. It's not about competing.
Not even if the socalled "competition" that you're trying so hard to
emulate have been to space and all that. It's about working together.
And sometimes about being that beacon that leads the way for the less
enlightened; e.g. go out there, talk with people working on the same
stuff and start working together. It's definitely not about stupid
zero-sum games with misunderstood "value adds" that may have
questionable value in the first place.

The fact that the Fedora leadership allows this art charade to go on and
on and on for eons is complete and utter FAIL. And it's making
contributors (and, no, not just me) move away from Fedora only to focus
on upstream. You are killing Fedora slowly this way.

     David