[kdewebdev-site] First draft of www.kdewebdev.org vision statement - feedback requested

[Eric Laffoon]

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On Saturday 10 April 2004 9:44 pm, Bill Chmura wrote:
> Why on earth would redhat ship a beta?  Did they get it from CVS and
> compile it to include?  Did a user submit it to them as an RPM to include?
>  Does anyone know, because that could be a problem that could be addressed
> if we knew how.
>
> (I am not longer using RH, that was basically the final straw for me)

RH 8.0 was heavily modified. That was their flagship "desktop release" where 
their press release basically said they had discovered the desktop, were 
leading Linux there walked on water and we should all follow. The is the 
release that Bero, their KDE packager, quit over with less than kind words 
for what they did and started Ark-Linux. They also filed a bug report on the 
single click, as if carpel tunnel was more fun (double clicking was started 
because the Xerox/apple mouse had only one button) and launched the Bluecurve 
theme, merging desktops and gutting parts of KDE like the print system... 
since they didn't have CUPS at the time. In short, they had to do a lot of 
modifications to software before they shipped it so they needed it months in 
advance. We wouldn't get patches from them because in their world view (read 
the press releases) we would get the code when they distributed RH and why 
would we run anything else.

I hate to sound like I'm down on them because if you read "Under the Radar" 
you realize what incredible work Bob Young did early on to help the growth of 
Linux. Sadly they proved to be grossly incompetent with desktop software and 
they couldn't sell it for the incredible prices they get for server packages. 
What was truly annoying is that Madrake shipped the same broken package 
several months later. 3.0 final was less than four weeks after 3.0pr1.

Unfortunately the less here is that however idealogical distributions start 
out they eventually end up making financial decisions and posturing 
themselves between users and developers. My intention is to posture direct 
interactin with users. For end user software we are better equiped to service 
it and funding us actually develops the software.

Coming back to the solution here... having a site that draws people to regular 
visits increases the chance that we will be able to get our message across. 
the next thing is to get that message out. The clear solution here is the 
following...
1) News for all various general news relating to the software like releases, 
new features, success stories, etc...
2) Alerts - posted newest first, filterable by severity and distributions 
affected

We have several options like a menu item or a link on the main page that goes 
bold and red when the incident rates are high. We can also have an email 
subscription to alert messages too.
- -- 
Eric Laffoon - Quanta+ Team Leader 
http://kdewebdev.org  eric at kdewebdev.org
Mailing list - http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/quanta
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