Re: What's cooking in git.git (Apr 2013, #05; Mon, 15)

From: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 23, 2013, 19:11 UTC
Message-ID: <CAMP44s2QVOSgT+GdZ9BhahGXmtJXO4Fv_WmPSkmEzjsdbe0hDw@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CALkWK0m05nWS=fQVCkFhNx7BT6_7qHN8W2WVW=6mGFeKKfN1Mw@mail.gmail.com>

On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 1:49 PM, Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> My point is simple: yes, it's nice to have a big user base.  We
> already do.  Now, what's the point of pitching to end-users who only
> use the most basic functionality?  Their inputs are likely to be
> useless (arising from misunderstandings) anyway.  They're not going to
> be the next developers.  And they're not going to help create what our
> next developer is looking for in us either (i.e. codebase, community).

That is your mistake right there. They *are* the next developers, you yourself came from there. We all did.

In fact, this notion that there's a divide between users and developers is a myth; it's a continuum that follows the Pareto distribution. It happens in every healthy open source project.

And this is not an assumption, I've measured it:

http://felipec.wordpress.com/2011/11/21/no-project-is-more-important-than-its-users/

70% of the commits in git.git come from people that have provided less than 6 patches. That 70% (maybe 80%, maybe 90%) would have never happened, if git didn't have a large enough user-base. I'm not idolizing the user-base, this project *is* the user-base, developers are users, and without users there's no project.

Again, in the words of Linus: no project is more important than it's users.

Cheers.

-- 
Felipe Contreras