From: Antony Stone <Antony.Stone_at_rockbox.open.source.it>
Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2008 12:17:51 +0100

On Sunday 22 June 2008 11:54, Dominik Riebeling wrote:

> On Sat, Jun 21, 2008 at 6:20 PM, Antony Stone wrote:
>
> > Software developers are very rarely the best judges of what works best
> > for non-technical users without any understanding of the internal
> > workings of a system, and those people can often come up with some of the
> > best ideas for how something should work, or what would be a nice
> > feature, that someone who starts thinking from how the system works in
> > detail at present simply doesn't have the perspective for.
>
> Who says that developers in a project like Rockbox even want to make
> something working "good" for users? While user input is interesting
> and valuable at least I'm doing work for fun (and also to educate
> myself ;-) and not to make a "product" (Rockbox is not a product -- I
> can't stress this enough). Programming for a product is what I do for
> a living.

And On Saturday 21 June 2008 20:29, Paul Louden wrote:

> Where is it written that the needs of the non-technical users come
> before the needs of the developers, though?

Ah, sorry. I was working from the premise that even open source projects try
to produce something that a large number of people want to use - not just the
developers themselves.

If that's not the basis of Rockbox then I can entirely understand why the
developers wouldn't want mere users coming along and having a say in what
they think would make the project better.

I apologise for apparently coming at this from almost completely the wrong
angle.


Antony.

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Received on 2008-06-22