[Scribus] Torture testing Scribus

Gustavo Homem gustavo
Sat Mar 25 01:58:55 CET 2006


Hi,

[...]

> > Unfortunately, some people tend to bite you if you hand them a gift.
> > It's usually a sign of missing self worthiness - it leads these people
> > to not to see the value of other people's work.
> >
> > Bye, Tino.
>
> In this case I think it was more a matter of the girl not quite
> understanding the nature of Open Source software.  I don't think she
> understood that Scribus developers are voluntarily giving their time and
> effort for the good of the community.  

Most "real world people", do not understand OSS, nor probably will. And it is 
questionable wether or not they should have to.

We,  open source developers, administrators, etc live and love this self 
feeding "ecosystem" and are proud to be part of it. On the other hand, end 
users/customers just want things that work as they expect and nothing will 
ever change their minds.

Furthermore, the attention time for most people is finite :-). And explaining 
OSS is quite time consuming. For some people, investing time on this kind of 
explanation has some nasty effects: 

- they won't understand
- no attention time will be left for pratical issues
- nothing will be "forgiven" because the produtct is OSS.

The OSS explanations can be saved for the ones which are ready for them. For 
the others starting with the pratical side of things, may be a better way to 
introduce OSS software.

Best regards
Gustavo

> Plus she was frustrated because she 
> really wanted to do a good job and the other two people in her group didn't
> care about quality.  As a result she had to do far more than her share of
> the work, including all of the layout work.  When Scribus didn't do what
> she expected it to do she became more frustrated.  I did explain that the
> version of Scribus we were using was a fairly early development version,
> and I hope she will look at Scribus again in six months or so, because
> based on the roadmap and the rate at which it has been improving Scribus
> will undoubtedly be much more usable by then.
>
> To be honest, I found 1.3.2 very usable with the few exceptions I noted,
> but I'm used to learning software and I'm used to finding ways of working
> around bugs or limitations.




-- 
Angulo S?lido - Tecnologias de Informa??o
http://angulosolido.pt




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