Comment 110 for bug 882274

On 03/12/11 01:38, Jonathan Gartner wrote:
> Disregarding any portion of the 20 million you
> (claim) to have, for the promise of a theoretical 180 million seems to
> me a be a very dangerous game to play for a fledgling company.

If you take a look at Sebastien's analysis of bug statistics, you'll see
we've fixed 16 bugs for every 1 we've declined to fix. That's amazing.
Given that it's well established that one cannot create a great product
if you try to be all things to all people, don't you accept that there
will be some suggestions and opinions we should not pursue?

And would 1 in 16 be about right? Or is it too low? Or too high? On what
basis would you make that assessment?

If you agree that there should of necessity be some bugs we will not
fix, who do you think should decide which of those suggestions or
wishlist items should be in, and which should be out? Don't you think
the underwriters, designers and developers of the project should have
that right? That this will result in the best product? If it's not them,
who should it be?

Say it's 1 in 16. Accepting that we have 20 million users, many of whom
are strongly opinionated about technical matters, would you expect to
see a lot of traffic on those few issues which, for whatever reason, are
wontfix? I would.

In the light of all that, is the fact that there are a very few bugs
which are wontfix, and which have a great deal of noise about them, so
surprising? Is it really a sign of a poor community engagement? Would a
poor community engagement not rather be hallmarked by a total silence
from me and others?

Instead, you have:

 * more activity on the public Ubuntu and Unity design lists than on any
other free software project design
 * greater responsiveness on bugs (in the sense of participating in the
discussion, not automatically saying yes) than elsewhere
 * participation by me, other designers, and senior engineers
 * a very high ratio of bugs fixed, relative to other free software projects

Now, in that light, you are welcome to draw your own conclusions. My
conclusion is that we have a dramatically open process, a healthy debate
and discussion, and an equally healthy mechanism for making decisions
and putting them into action, which is what the free software community
needs.

The tagline for the founding of Ubuntu was "Linux for Human Beings".
That was startling at the time because it said precisely the opposite of
what you are suggesting; it said that the average human being is more
important to us than those who Linux has served in the past; those are
the values that attracted the people who actually build Ubuntu - all of
it, from Unity through the server release and Kubuntu and Edubuntu. You
are welcome in this community, but not welcome to redefine its mission
to suit your needs.

Mark