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

On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 1:49 PM, Ramkumar Ramachandra
[off-list ref] wrote:

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