equality

It’s accepted wisdom that all men are created equal. A lot of people derive from this the idea that all people should be treated equally and have the same rights. It’s the basis for democracy after all. As such, many communities strive to achieve equality and even set it as their explicit goal.

However, in recent times there were two cases that made me doubt in equality as a good goal for any community. The first was the discussion about Fedora’s target audience, in particular defining the target as someone who “is likely to collaborate [...] with Fedora” which excludes a whole lot of lazy or uninterested people. The other is Lefty’s surveys where nobody wondered that the surveys assume everyone’s opinion is equally important.

Then there are a lot of places where not having equality is normal and everybody would look at you funny if you were to advocate it. Meritocracy is a very positive world in the open source development communities for example. It’s a known fact that the maintainer decides which patches go in and which don’t. (Luis Villa gave a talk about this at GUADEC 2003. Slides don’t seem to exist anymore.) So what’s the right way here?

I had a discussion about this with my girlfriend and we found a lot of similar places in the real world where groups wanted to appeal to everyone and ended up being unrecognizable from everyone surrounding them: The Greens for example became just another party without any differences. Apple is in the process of losing it’s style – you’re not special anymore if you have an iPhone or an iPod – everybody has one. And Google does evil these days. All of them saw an increase in “market share” in the process though.

So it seems that in the end it all comes down to this: Is it worth giving up one’s values for more market share?

I personally think everybody who tries to be inclusive is betraying his foundations and original goals. I’m not goint to call it “sells their soul”, because it sounds cheesy, but that’s how it feels to me. So GNOME, please do not give up requesting Freedom. And Fedora, please continue to target the people involved in being bleeding edge. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Syndicated 2010-01-17 13:02:23 from Swfblag

Happy New Year

First of all, I need to excuse to my fellow blog readers for never posting a link to the video hackfest conclusions. The page still looks spot-on, maybe apart from the timeline. I’d add half a year to it.

I’ve also just started my new job in Red Hat’s desktop team. The job description so far just involves hacking on the same old stuff: world domination. I haven’t heard Flash or browsers mentioned, but I think I’ve heard the words video editing and video conferencing. Exciting times ahead for me!

PS: I would have linked my new work email address, but I’m not going to mention it anywhere. These people already had enough Schadenfreude trying to invent connotations for it.

Syndicated 2010-01-04 18:55:32 from Swfblag

Video Hackfest day 2

Carl stayed true to his awesomeness from yesterday: He updated the hackfest notes with the things we did today. In particular, it includes “hacking ideas” that we’d like to work on.

I’ve spent a lot of time discussing the ideas of my gst-plugins-cairo design with all people. And I have to say I’m happy to say that the general approach has seen excitement from all sides and there doesn’t seem to be any big issues with it. THe best way to summarize it is probably an event from today: Edward ran a gst-launch pipeline as a benchmark for gst-plugins-cairo and it completed in 0.2 seconds.

Syndicated 2009-11-21 00:41:40 from Swfblag

Video Hackfest day 1

The Video hackfest is on!
I originally wanted to summarize the happenings of the day, but Carl took notes: Go read them. I just want to add that I’m very happy with how it’s turning out: Lots of discussions happening all around, the weather is great and the hostel is awesome. Off to bed so I don’t miss any discussions tomorrow…

Syndicated 2009-11-20 00:11:18 from Swfblag

I do it my way

While preparing the video hackfest I realized Google maps is still not the best guide for walking: “Please stay clear of pedestrian precincts“.
 
Google’s suggested way from the accomodation to the venue on the left, my suggestion on the right. I guess I’ll do it my way.

Also, for everyone living behind a rock: The video hackfest is officially announced, lots of video goodness for everyone ahead.

Syndicated 2009-10-26 21:55:12 from Swfblag