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With the amount of hate I see over Gnome's interface designs, if it was true that submitting mockups was enough to force a project to change its direction, Gnom

With the amount of hate I see over Gnome's interface designs, if it was true that submitting mockups was enough to force a project to change its direction, Gnome would have a different interface. The fact that Gnome was able to choose a direction they wanted to go and then go in that direction even over the extremely vocal protests of a large portion of the community is if anything proof that you absolutely can reject mockups from community members if you don't want to implement them. Ultimately, the project decides what interface it wants to have. And community members can protest that direction, they can complain that project's priorities are wrong, they can fork things (and Gnome has forks), they can do whatever -- but they lack the ability to force the project to abandon a design that its owners like. That's a good thing about Open Source. The idea that UI designers are somehow hijacking Gnome because they advocated for designs that the org voluntarily implemented... it makes no sense to me at all. Does the org own the project or not, it's their choice. Unless the idea here is that Gnome should have been obligated to accept design critiques from people outside of the project and change their internal designs just because the people proposing changes from outside the project knew a programming language; but that would be a silly thing to say.

coldtea 3y ago
>The idea that UI designers are somehow hijacking Gnome because they advocated for designs that the org voluntarily implemented... it makes no sense to me at all. Does the org own the project or not, it's their choice. (...) Unless the idea here is that Gnome should have been obligated to accept design critiques from people outside of the project and change their internal designs just because the people proposing changes from outside the project knew a programming language; but that would be a silly thing to say. Well, here's the problem: these people proposing the changes are not outside the project. They are within the project. And their vote is as good as a dev's (and it's easier to gather dozens of them, as it doesn't require skills for doing the much harder and more prolonged dev work). And in orgs with a non-dev bureucracy and management (like Mozilla and Gnome) they can get buy-in from those "higher ups" too. And they can also create enough friction and bikeshedding on regular FOSS projects too, as long as those don't have a BDFL and everybody has a voice.
- danShumway 3y ago
  > Well, here's the problem: these people proposing the changes are not outside the project. They are within the project. So what, your issue is that project owners get to decide who they work with? If the people working on UI in Gnome are part of the Gnome project that is not in any way randos coming in and bikeshedding over the UI -- it's a project self-determining what it wants to do. I'm sorry they're organized in a way that you (an outsider to the project) find offensive. Yeah, of course the vote of project members is as good if not better than the votes of people outside of the project because these projects get to set up their own orgs and governance structures and they don't have to justify or prove to anyone outside the project why the people they work with deserve to be there. And that is one of the things that is amazing about Open Source. You can just go do stuff and when somebody else shows up on your Github repo and says, "the UI designers are ruining your software" you can tell them to take a hike because they don't get to decide how your project is run. They're not required to consult with you. ---- I don't see what any of this has to do with no-code contributions. Encouraging non-coders to write documentation and tutorials and help with feature suggestions is bad because you have a problem with project management? By the "higher ups" I guess you mean the literal orgs behind the projects? You don't need quotation marks for that, those are just called higher-ups, that's how organizations work. It's still the case that the people who build and control Open Source projects can take them in any direction they want regardless of what people outside of the projects want them to do. Of course, Open Source has lots of mechanisms to avoid problems with bad project direction -- notably, forking, which should be hecking easy since all of the people complaining are apparently such excellent programmers.

coldtea 3y ago

>The idea that UI designers are somehow hijacking Gnome because they advocated for designs that the org voluntarily implemented... it makes no sense to me at all. Does the org own the project or not, it's their choice. (...) Unless the idea here is that Gnome should have been obligated to accept design critiques from people outside of the project and change their internal designs just because the people proposing changes from outside the project knew a programming language; but that would be a silly thing to say. Well, here's the problem: these people proposing the changes are not outside the project. They are within the project. And their vote is as good as a dev's (and it's easier to gather dozens of them, as it doesn't require skills for doing the much harder and more prolonged dev work). And in orgs with a non-dev bureucracy and management (like Mozilla and Gnome) they can get buy-in from those "higher ups" too. And they can also create enough friction and bikeshedding on regular FOSS projects too, as long as those don't have a BDFL and everybody has a voice.

danShumway 3y ago
> Well, here's the problem: these people proposing the changes are not outside the project. They are within the project. So what, your issue is that project owners get to decide who they work with? If the people working on UI in Gnome are part of the Gnome project that is not in any way randos coming in and bikeshedding over the UI -- it's a project self-determining what it wants to do. I'm sorry they're organized in a way that you (an outsider to the project) find offensive. Yeah, of course the vote of project members is as good if not better than the votes of people outside of the project because these projects get to set up their own orgs and governance structures and they don't have to justify or prove to anyone outside the project why the people they work with deserve to be there. And that is one of the things that is amazing about Open Source. You can just go do stuff and when somebody else shows up on your Github repo and says, "the UI designers are ruining your software" you can tell them to take a hike because they don't get to decide how your project is run. They're not required to consult with you. ---- I don't see what any of this has to do with no-code contributions. Encouraging non-coders to write documentation and tutorials and help with feature suggestions is bad because you have a problem with project management? By the "higher ups" I guess you mean the literal orgs behind the projects? You don't need quotation marks for that, those are just called higher-ups, that's how organizations work. It's still the case that the people who build and control Open Source projects can take them in any direction they want regardless of what people outside of the projects want them to do. Of course, Open Source has lots of mechanisms to avoid problems with bad project direction -- notably, forking, which should be hecking easy since all of the people complaining are apparently such excellent programmers.