I agree with you. wanted to add some bits to this.
What is think is that no matter how organised the inc. is you can’t do anything serious(like a modern OS competing with other Modern OSes on the market) using this “community driven” model. The closer it get’s to the final product the harder it is to make decisions(that’s why it’s so “not good” atm)
From my personal experience I can tell that first of all Haiku community(at least those who are active on the mailing list) is not that friendly.
Basically it’s divided into 3 groups:
1 one(70%) is packed with low end PC users or some guys in their 40’s or 50’s with websites like this http://www.goodeveca.net/ or people who hate Macs just cuz… fck ya thats why you ritchie hipster… and will gladly argue you on UI/UX(again my experience) or when they run out of arguments will just start insulting u. In short incompetent people with ambitions.
The second group(25%) of people are those who actually did something that is considered as a “big thing” for Haiku(like a an icon vector format for example) those guys consider them selves as a Founding fathers of Haiku(at least they act like that, The Sheriff at Walmart) while o.c. most of the time even their code is messy and the end result is far from perfection. They will o.c. find an excuse on that… something like “what did u expect I didn’t get paid for this”. Well I don’t care about that dude, if what u’ve done there is I’d say “not good enough” it’s not a “learn how to create an OS” club here. Or again if they run out of ideas they will just insult you. I personally find this funny.
The third group(5%) consists of much more adequate people devs, artists, advanced users, just users, but they mostly prefer to remain silent(cuz they’re tired of this just like me)
To sum things up. On projects of this scale it doesn’t matter what u did 10 years or even 5 years ago, it doesn’t matter how many patches u’ve committed. The end product is still not good enough and you’re not helping to make a radical step in whichever direction it takes u to. Simply cuz u know that u won’t keep up with that and you don’t want your name to be forgotten as well… u wanna be a Walmart Sheriff forever.
Also at most of the big OS production companies like MS, Apple, Ubuntu; Projects are done by leaders(directors), who make decisions thus are responsible for them and don’t have to argue and/or convince some random clueless uneducated ppl. “Community” is not a market it’s just wrong to build an OS on community demand(plus this community is tiny) iOS has no community nor Android nor Mac OS X nor Windows they all have their very own “Market”(consumer market o.c. and please ppl stop that bull#$@ about open source project, Blender for example is open source just like Haiku. check it out)
Unless Haiku stops this “Community” driven bull*it I see no future for this. In fact look at this OS now, check the forum or mailing lists with hundreds of (good) suggestions from users trashed just because people here “don’t” have a time to make changes to something that is made years ago(well then get the hell out and stop arguing with people). Or are just so old school and selfish that are actually happy with Haikus current state.
Totally agreed, some corp should take over the management of inc. Someone who at least knows the term “Product” or “Market” and communicates with volunteers without mailing lists but directly.
