Comment 233 for bug 390508

Well let's approach this logically, scientifically, sensibly, and reasonably.

We have an easy opportunity to add a "choice", to have the option or not. But we are choosing not to have a choice.

The whole point of Ubuntu and free software is to be better than commercial, to actually have the best and brightest minds contribute, not highschool hackers who just want to make a buck and write buggy code.

We should somehow at the very least, come half way and allow a choice for to have the expire option or not.

Just because no one else does it does not mean we should not have that option (note I am not saying that we absolutely must have it, but a choice).

We can choose to use Linux, Windows, or Mac, or something else entirely, we can and should have a choice to enable such a timeout/expire in our OSD displays. Note that I said choice to enable or disable on the server side, not explicitly accepting expire arguments on the client side.

With regards to the "silent majority", we don't know how many people have come across this bug, we don't know how many people want it or do not want it.

But we have many comments from people who have spent many hours trying to figure out why the expire timeout was not being detected so I think placing a warning about the expire timeout not being accepted is reasonable.

Throughout history, having fewer choices has always, eventually, led to monopolies, dictators, and single source dominations. I don't think we are close to that with NotifyOSD, but we are going in that direction if we explicitly deny such a choice.