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"The option always remains to change it yourself or stop using it." If I changed every bit of software I dislike, I would have no time left for my actual job.

"The option always remains to change it yourself or stop using it." If I changed every bit of software I dislike, I would have no time left for my actual job. Yeah, I get it, these volunteers found the time to work on this one project and therefore get more of a say about what changes will be made, but you know what? They also have to use other software, and they would not have time to work on something like Gnome if they were busy making changes to Wayland or the Kernel or whatever else. Worse, in my experience, Gnome developers will turn down patches that do not align with their ideas about how things should work. I have had it happen to me, I have seen it happen to others -- even when we find time to change something, we cannot commit to maintaining our own private fork, and dealing with merge after merge or trying to keep up with a project that has as much activity as Gnome or Wayland. Obviously some patches need to be rejected, but in the case of Gnome I have found that rejection often comes down to their notorious "less configurability is better" attitude. As for stopping using it, how does that work with critical packages like systemd? At some point you wind up having to ditch an entire distribution, with all its infrastructure and maintainers, just to get one use case to work. In some cases you are left with a choice between a project that has the features you need but has received no updates (including security updates) in years, or a project that does not have the features you need but is actively maintained. More often than not people will just give up on their use case, which in some cases means giving up on open source software entirely since that use case was the reason they were using open source in the first place. Some might think that is fine, users have the freedom to choose what software to run, but the fact is that fewer users means fewer contributors (including many people who make only the small but very important contribution of reporting bugs) and a less robust open source ecosystem.

foldr 6y ago
All I see here is that you're not going to get everything that you want. No-one is. We are all using software that's imperfectly adapted to our personal use cases. Unfortunately, unless we're paying, no-one is under any obligation to change it for us, and we'll have to make do as best we can.
- betterunix2 6y ago
  The funny thing is that a lot of users switch to open source software because the proprietary software they had been paying for was not supporting their obscure use case. You know, it is not something worth the investment because only a handful of users care or it works against the interests of some business partner or whatever.
rmah 6y ago
Yeah, I get it, these volunteers found the time to work on this one project and therefore get more of a say about what changes will be made, but you know what? They don't get "more of a say", they get ALL the say. This is the way of Free/Open Source. As for stopping using it, how does that work with critical packages like systemd? It works the exact same way. If you don't like it, don't use it. Simple as that.
- betterunix2 6y ago
  Nothing wrong with that attitude if you don't mind large numbers of users, many of whom are very technically competent and able to make meaningful contributions, giving up on the open source ecosystem. Most users do not have time to figure out how to stop using systemd when that is what their distro uses, let alone how to do so while staying on top of updates for whatever they are using instead. Most users who stop using systemd are going to switch to OS X or Windows, and they will contribute less, maybe not at all, to open source projects. The result will be an open source ecosystem that is less able to keep pace with proprietary software and has an even harder time staying relevant.

foldr 6y ago

All I see here is that you're not going to get everything that you want. No-one is. We are all using software that's imperfectly adapted to our personal use cases. Unfortunately, unless we're paying, no-one is under any obligation to change it for us, and we'll have to make do as best we can.

betterunix2 6y ago
The funny thing is that a lot of users switch to open source software because the proprietary software they had been paying for was not supporting their obscure use case. You know, it is not something worth the investment because only a handful of users care or it works against the interests of some business partner or whatever.

rmah 6y ago

Yeah, I get it, these volunteers found the time to work on this one project and therefore get more of a say about what changes will be made, but you know what? They don't get "more of a say", they get ALL the say. This is the way of Free/Open Source. As for stopping using it, how does that work with critical packages like systemd? It works the exact same way. If you don't like it, don't use it. Simple as that.

betterunix2 6y ago
Nothing wrong with that attitude if you don't mind large numbers of users, many of whom are very technically competent and able to make meaningful contributions, giving up on the open source ecosystem. Most users do not have time to figure out how to stop using systemd when that is what their distro uses, let alone how to do so while staying on top of updates for whatever they are using instead. Most users who stop using systemd are going to switch to OS X or Windows, and they will contribute less, maybe not at all, to open source projects. The result will be an open source ecosystem that is less able to keep pace with proprietary software and has an even harder time staying relevant.