[openmoko-announce] Openmoko on Design

Tue Jul 29 11:34:12 CEST 2008

> If you need a benevolent dictator to lead, why not become one yourself?
> If you need standards why not make them? This is not a responsibility
> of the Openmoko team. They already gave us the damn thing to build it
> all on. This really is the job of the community. Stop whining and start
> doing the job yourself if you want it done. It's no one else's
> responsibility.

sorry, but that's imho part of the responsibility of om -- if i don't liek 
i don't need to use it but why should i (and everyone else) invent taht 
kind of stuff?
distributors like debian/suse/redhat/... even gentoo create distributions 
so you don't need to worry about all that tedious stuff like installing, 
updating, uninstalling, keeping track of files, creating config files and 
so on.
most users of linux do not use it because the want to create their system 
 from scratch -- the are happy that someone organizes things that need to 
be taken care of and the adjust or modify where needed.
basically the same thing is it i was expecting from om.
i was hoping that these decisions where made already and i had not to 
care about them -- i am, like probably the most of us, rather 
application-oriented, and i want to focus on managing existing 
applications and -- hopefully in a near future -- developing my own, using 
firm foundations.
those foundations do in no way harm the freedom to create a completely 
different kind of managing the freerunner, like the pure existence of 
debian or slackware didn't hinder the creation and growing up of mandrake, 
suse or redhat.
but the _user_ had a distribution to work with.
i read seans mail rather as a polite way to say "we're pissed off by all 
this criticism".
well, as a ceo of om he can't be that frank as jay or marcus bauer from 
tangogps, but certainly he has a point here.
otoh the hair raising issue of the root login or the thread regarding the 
keyboard toggle of asu prove that those being critical have valid points, 
too.
after all, we're now (imo) at the usual point with projects being so 
overeloaded with ideas and imagination:
people see the realy thing and realize that a lot of high hopes are far 
 from reality -- adapting to these new facts is a lengthy process with a 
lot of criticism until the vision and reality match.
i can fully understand that people like jay, knowing the neo1973 and 
hoping for the fr to fix a lot of shortcomings, _are_ annoyed, in 
particular when they get the impression that everything they say dies away 
unheard.