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Comment by swiley | Hacker News Reader

>fit the developers needs, not the user needs.

This is why I qualified open source with "community maintained." When there's a strong partition between the community and the developers then FOSS looks a lot like closed software.

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> This is why I qualified open source with "community maintained." When there's a strong partition between the community and the developers then FOSS looks a lot like closed software.

I'm just going to come out and say that I think Gnome and Firefox are two of the worst offenders of this.

Right. At least with Gnome even distro maintainers struggle to keep up with the churn and build it, users have little hope of success there. The result is a partition between the community and the developers who spend a lot of time in the code.

Firefox has a similar situation although I would argue it isn't quite as bad.

If you have suggestions on how to fix that I think a lot of people would love to hear it, but for now, sadly the task of building a fully complete desktop and application platform means that there is a lot of code and a lot of churn. This is true of every single major platform.

Worst, but not nearly the only. This kind of partitioning describes the vast majority of new projects that I encounter and have an interest in helping. Most ironic are those projects that simultaneously purport to have a mission for human rights and freedom.

Not really, you just happened to pick two projects that are particularly large and particularly old. Drive-by commits are a lot less valuable in those type of projects, unfortunately, but you can still find places to contribute if you spend the time to look.

While I did pick the projects for their notability, I could point out the fact that Gnome have an active disdain for extension developers and the entire idea of extensions as well as Mozilla continuing to make unpopular decision after unpopular decision with their browser.

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