Decadence… ehm… Call for more contributors? :) 12 June, 2008
Since everyone here seems to be interested in destroying our community from the inside 
I’d like to throw my impressions and my ideas.
I think that, rather than thousand discussions about ethical/philosophical reasons behind this whole feeling (these discussions in the end are useless, in my opinion), what we should do is involving more guys from the community. Exactly.
The simple advantage of the free software is that everyone can contribute, and at the same time the disadvantage is that our biggest softwares are usually maintained/developed only by few guys…
The impression I had in these 2 years of experience as a GNOME dev is that _we_are_few_, and much of the ideas and features we have in mind can’t be done because the time is limited and two devs can’t work on 100 bugfix and 100 new features at the same time. Bugs have the priority, of course, so we will see only few features of the planned ones. But if these 2 devs were 6 (so 4 new contributors) I’m sure we would have seen a different scenario, with much more features implemented of the 100 requested
From my experience, unfortunately, much of the work I’ve done was done alone, without, for example, a couple of guys who could have helped me in getting the same things done quicker.
Seeing the number of new linux users that everyday are switching from other operating systems, I’m sure that the number of contributors should increase, that’s the way! Imagine 100 new gnome devs! ehehe too optimistic Imagine a free software world where everyone learns how to contribute with his small part, translating, doing a new icon, working on a plugin… the bugzilla *attach+patch+review* is so slow with only 2 devs for each module.
We should involve more guys, maybe I’m too optimistic, but it’s my vision. And, imho, this is the only way.
PS: maybe we could recruit guys from a special wiki page in GNOME Live, with the list of the modules/softwares that need help?
Posted in English, GNOME, GTK, Icons | 20 Comments »
