[Lazarus] Bashing the developers

[Juha Manninen]

On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 8:29 PM, Jürgen Hestermann
<juergen.hestermann at gmx.de> wrote:
> Of course, nobody here wants to miss any of the current state of Free
> Pascal/Lazarus.
> So anybody who was/is involved in coding here can be thanked very much.
> But does that mean that any discussions about improvements is forbidden?

I overreacted and used stronger words than necessary. Sorry about that!
The issue itself was valid though. Your emphasis was that current
developers should do more and better work.
It is a little sensitive issue in a purely volunteer based project. If
you had some idea of improving things yourself, things would be
different.

See, a commercial product works differently. Its developers are
filtered and isolated from user feedback more. Feedback and bug
reports come from support channels and personnel. Requirements come
from marketing through development managers. And developers get salary
which compensates any possible negative feedback.
It means people can write ugly things about for example Delphi in
public programming forums as a funny "small talk".
It is not personified to anybody (much anyway) and the developers can
continue undisturbed.

Open source is more ... open!
Voluntary people work because they want to. They are not pushed by
anybody else to it.
How can it work? It is something very subtle and fragile. The
motivation comes exactly from the freedom.
Between developers there are never demands like "you must do that
feature because I say so". The freedom to do or not to do is a "holy
ground".
Even projects that have a dictator (Lazarus project has none) do not
impose such demands. Otherwise the project would be forked very
quickly.
The highly open and transparent development model + the fragile
motivation based on freedom makes an open source project vulnerable to
attacks.
Communication in mailing list goes directly to developers without
buffering or filtering or middle-men.

One more thing:
I wrote earlier "arguments were pure lies meant to agitate people"
which was out of context.
The context were some forum flames, especially the pro-/contra-CodeTyphon war.
If somebody does not know what happened, send me a personal mail and I
give a recap.
I will NOT return to that topic more in a public list.

Juha