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

[David Nielsen]

2008/10/13 David Zeuthen <davidz at redhat.com>

> 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.


I can only applaud you for saying this so clearly. I fully agree, all of
Fedora ahould be about upstream participation where possible. Added value
here is a decoy, it trades off artistic satisfaction for full coverage,
accesability and a unified UI experience.

- David
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