Novell will (continue to) support KDE after all

[Evan Leibovitch]

CLIFFORD ILKAY wrote:

>On November 16, 2005 16:03, Christopher Browne wrote:
>  
>
>>If someone is trying to influence the direction of an OSS project,
>>they can either:
>>a) Become one of the developers, making them one of the 0.01% that
>>dictate what happens, or
>>b) Work on your motivational skills, on the off chance that you can
>>convince one or another of the "dictators" to do what you say, or
>>c) Wish uselessly.
>>    
>>
>
>(Make the following c and the existing c, d)
>
>c) Hire a developer to make things the way you think they should be. 
>Money talks.
>  
>
True; witness the growth of OSDL, which these days is nothing more than
Linux vendors' assertion of their priorities on the world of open
source, using money to buy an agenda which otherwise would not be pursued.

I guess this is where open source meets the wall it will have to jump if
it wants to be anything more than a popular but tiny niche. Will open
source forever be merely the realm of those with skills in coding (and
those monied enough to hire them)? If such, it may succeed as a way for
developers to scratch their collective itches, but it fails miserably as
a way to evolve society into new ways to think about technology development.

What's most sad in this analysis is the fact that "wish uselessly" just
doesn't happen in a capitalist environment. If a demand genuinely
exists, proprietary vendors will step in to fill that gap without
waiting for end-users to hire their own programmers. Then the open
source people will whine about the popularity and power of proprietary
vendors, failing to understand the value of serving public rather than
private need ...

Thankfully, the options open to the end-user community are far broader
than the narrow selection presented by Chrostopher; I leave it to the
entrepreneurial-minded of this list to fill in the blanks.

- Evan

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