Re: Woctave-another gui front end

[Nicholas Jankowski]

On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 5:24 PM, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:

On 19-Dec-2012, Stephen Montgomery-Smith wrote:

| But as to your first point, why do you carp quite so much on people who
| point out the lack of some feature, but don't have the time or abilities
| to contribute? 

...

I can't speak directly for Jordi, but I think I've had similar
reactions in the past to people that seemed to be demanding something
for nothing, or who seemed to expect that I do some work for them, all
while they were telling me how the work I had already done was somehow
inferior

...

Maybe Jordi needs to take a break from the
list.  I know I did, and that's why I rarely post here now.

jwe

_______________________________________________

All well and good John, but can we please get back to the all-important 
task of figuring out how to make lookfor outperform Google?  Priorities,
 man!  :)  

"When open source leads to open sores, free starts to get pretty costly."  -- can't remember where i read that

So, to at least partially defend any implication that Jordi is carping without cause, I work with an IRL origination that's run 100% by volunteers and serves a few hundred people. What you learn very quickly is that saying "hey, we could really use someone to do X" gets no response. Pointing to an individual and saying, "hey, would you be able to help with this one thing?"  many times gets a positive response, and generates a new volunteer, lowering the barrier for the next request to that person. similarly, even among volunteers, asking someone to take on a task, or even assigning a new task to a person (giving them the option to find someone else to delegate it, too.) will make things happen that often would lie dormant. It's also typically an effective response to the entitlement mentality some people take toward volunteer groups. 

Apart from a few exceptions, Octave development is all voluntary. if someone wants something, they should be prepared to assist in getting it, or be comfortable waiting for it too happen 'some time'. Most of what I've seen is Jordi being frequently up front about the 'you want it? you can help fix it' approach. 

nickj