Re: Kickstarter was not successful... but it did help things...

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 22 Dec 2013, at 17:36, Doc O'Leary <droleary@7usenet2013.subsume.com> wrote:

> In article <mailman.9862.1387588676.10748.discuss-gnustep@gnu.org>,
> Germán Arias <germanandre@gmx.es> wrote:
> 
>>> Again with the stupid rush to implement things . . .
>> 
>> Remember that, in general, write free software is a hobby. Just to see
>> what happens.
> 
> That's no reason to abandon science.

This refrain seems to be a troll ... the person seeming to abandon science here 
is YOU.  You keep talking about how people are being unscientific and how you 
are scientific, but have presented nothing to support that idea, giving the 
appearance that you believe that being 'scientific' means agreeing with you.

Now, I can see that this *could* be a scientific endeavour on your part:
eg. you hypothesised  that deliberately goading people on a mailing list would 
spur them into action, and the action would be beneficial to your purposes, and 
now you are testing that hypothesis.

However, this seems unnecessary as that sort of experiment has been done many 
times before and psychology (which might be a science) has already discovered 
that there are generally better ways of motivating people.

Take for instance your false assertion that the GNUstep project is hostile to 
OSX users.  A better (ie generally tried, tested, proven more efficient) than 
the negative approach would have been to take note of the preponderance of 
evidence that it's osx friendly, and propose ways of making it even friendlier. 
 Buried in this thread is the suggestion that OSX users find it hard to get 
started;  it's a good point.
Perhaps we should have a prominent bit on the website saying that OSX users can 
most easily use gnustep for cross-platform development by installing a virtual 
machine on their OSX system ... this is so obvious to us old-timers that we 
don't notice that it might need to be stated.  To make it easier we might 
supply a VM image, eg debian,  for a freely available virtualisation engine 
that works on OSX (perhaps you have the skills to provide that?).

You have raised a few good points, in this discussion, and while it's true that 
they've all been discussed before, that doesn't mean that re-raising them is 
not worthwhile.  You have ideas to offer, so why not offer them in a spirit of 
positive criticism?

There's a fairly clear statement of what GNUstep is (implied goal) on the 
website (the overview at the top of the home page and the first link from the 
page!), yet you keep saying there needs to be discussion and agreement on a 
goal. 
Possibly you didn't read it, possibly you did but are trolling, but I guess 
most likely you just don't like that statement.  That's legitimate enough (I'm 
no longer sure I like it myself), so you could seek to point out the advantages 
of modifying/improving that in some way.  Surely that would be more effective 
than saying there is no goal.

In general, providing positive criticism has been scientifically proven to work 
best (natural psychological resistance means that an attempt at neutral is 
effectively negative).

Go on, you know you can be scientific ... embrace a positive attitude :-)