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Why Drawing Tablet Brands Won't Collaborate on Linux Floss Drivers

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Re: Why Drawing Tablet Brands Won't Collaborate on Linux Floss Drivers

#61

Post by bee_rider »

pmontra wrote: post #47
cortesoft wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it interesting that you think this rename serves a purpose when the master to main rename does not. Neither change has any technical reason. The only reason why either name change was desired is because some contributors were upset by the names.

I'm entering troubled waters but hey... The master to main issue is an accident of the history of the USA, still unresolved in its consequences, when most of the world was not practicing slavery anymore. The typical reaction outside the USA is rolling eyes and hope that all the ethnic groups inside the USA will finally get along. If the IT and economic powerhouse of the world were India instead of the USA and Indians…

It seems most likely to me that this particular sensitivity to any sort of social controversy and the status of the US as the sort of… de-facto default place of doing international business for a long time, are probably linked. The US corporate culture’s default stance is probably a learned reflex. Better to look a little over-sensitive, than to scuttle a deal by blundering into somebody’s cultural trigger.

Re: Why Drawing Tablet Brands Won't Collaborate on Linux Floss Drivers

#62

Post by graemep »

pmontra wrote: post #35
jrm4 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Preach. And it's a disease . Signed, the guy who will forever believe GIMP could have been a contender with a name change decades ago.

In non-English speaking countries gimp is a short word that is so seldom used that nobody knows what it means. I used GIMP for a very long time before running into a story about the meaning of the English world. It was only GNU Image Manipulation Program to me. It still is a contender for image editing programs, for limited photo retouch, for very limited drawing (draw a rectangle outline without googling?) I use Lib…

It did stop it from being used in a multiple markets though. Fine is some places, not in others is not good branding, especially when one of the places its not fine in is the biggest and most influential market.

Re: Why Drawing Tablet Brands Won't Collaborate on Linux Floss Drivers

#66

Post by kouteiheika »

cortesoft wrote: post #29
kouteiheika wrote: post #27

> Well, because it's true: many of the repositories are named after "Wacom". It's a historical legacy on GNU/Linux. It's also a decade-long debate that these repos should be renamed differently. Okay... let's rename them then? I know it's silly, but, well, we've went through the whole pointless `master` -> `main` branch rename in so many projects which was much more disruptive -- at least this one could serve a purpo…

I find it interesting that you think this rename serves a purpose when the master to main rename does not. Neither change has any technical reason. The only reason why either name change was desired is because some contributors were upset by the names.

> Neither change has any technical reason. The only reason why either name change was desired is because some contributors were upset by the names.

Indeed, neither has any technical reason.

I suppose you're right that both changes have a purpose -- one could feasibly convince a company to contribute Linux drivers (a net win for everyone), and the other is a constant annoyance which wastes everyone's time (is this project using `main`, or `master` -- you never know, so have fun getting it wrong all the time) just to allow certain groups of people/corporations to virtue signal**.

** -- If "master" is such a naughty word then where are all of the people getting offended by e.g. "Mastercard", "Ticketmaster", "Master Lock", "MasterBrand", and many other company/product names, and why those names aren't getting changed? Why there isn't any outrage about them? My point here is not to engage in whataboutism, but just to point out that the word isn't actually offensive when used in a non-offensive manner, and virtually no one is actually genuinely upset about it.

Re: Why Drawing Tablet Brands Won't Collaborate on Linux Floss Drivers

#67

Post by zem »

technojamin wrote: post #50
burnte wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would categorize all those as emotional reasons not to change, not logical reasons. "It's hard!" So? "It's complicated" So? "Some of it other people control." This will always be the case, you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good enough. If the status quo means a worse project, then you're not changing because you don't WANT to, not because it's a good idea. And that's an emotional, not logical ,decision.

I think it's the exact opposite of what you're saying. The maintainers sound like they're only considering the technical cost (and judging it not worth it) instead of factoring in the political consequences of keeping the same naming. I actually really respect those who value the technical over the political, but in a large-scale, public-facing project, some politics must be played. It seems to me like you're viewing…

it's not the exact opposite, saying that the technical aspects are more important than the political ones is an emotional stance, not a logical one.

Re: Why Drawing Tablet Brands Won't Collaborate on Linux Floss Drivers

#68

Post by solarkraft »

technojamin wrote: post #50
burnte wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would categorize all those as emotional reasons not to change, not logical reasons. "It's hard!" So? "It's complicated" So? "Some of it other people control." This will always be the case, you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good enough. If the status quo means a worse project, then you're not changing because you don't WANT to, not because it's a good idea. And that's an emotional, not logical ,decision.

I think it's the exact opposite of what you're saying. The maintainers sound like they're only considering the technical cost (and judging it not worth it) instead of factoring in the political consequences of keeping the same naming. I actually really respect those who value the technical over the political, but in a large-scale, public-facing project, some politics must be played. It seems to me like you're viewing…

The ones playing political games dressing them up as technical ones are the worst:

“My approach is technically correct and I won’t change it even though it causes issues down the line”. I’ve seen this a lot in the Gnome/Wayland world.

> I don't think people get into kernel maintenance to play politics.

I’m not a kernel developer and the projects I’ve worked on haven’t even been that big, but even there it was necessary to cater to multiple stakeholders and consider multiple viewpoints. I’d go as far as saying that software development in general gets pretty political pretty quickly, as soon as you depend on somebody else’s work or somebody else depends on yours. Every decision will impact somebody and different options will do so differently - these are political considerations.

I can’t imagine this being less of an issue in the kernel.

Re: Why Drawing Tablet Brands Won't Collaborate on Linux Floss Drivers

#69

Post by xenophonf »

__mharrison__ wrote: post #15
KaiserPro wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name changes are controversial. Nothing gets nerds going more than changing a project name so companies work better with OSS.

Second hardest thing in CS besides cache invalidation and off by one errors....

Don't concurrency. forget about

Re: Why Drawing Tablet Brands Won't Collaborate on Linux Floss Drivers

#70

Post by chrismorgan »

cortesoft wrote: post #29
kouteiheika wrote: post #27

> Well, because it's true: many of the repositories are named after "Wacom". It's a historical legacy on GNU/Linux. It's also a decade-long debate that these repos should be renamed differently. Okay... let's rename them then? I know it's silly, but, well, we've went through the whole pointless `master` -> `main` branch rename in so many projects which was much more disruptive -- at least this one could serve a purpo…

I find it interesting that you think this rename serves a purpose when the master to main rename does not. Neither change has any technical reason. The only reason why either name change was desired is because some contributors were upset by the names.

When I started using a graphics tablet, long ago, I was confused about why all this stuff was labelled Wacom, and whether it was applicable to me or not, when using a device of another brand. Some parts of it seemed to be, and other parts didn’t? It was very confusing, and a genuine confusion that made me uncertain even in purchasing. (It would be less confusing now because user-facing parts don’t touch the “Wacom” name as much any more.)

Whereas the “master” thing was transparent linguistic nonsense and a strictly-US cultural thing that a few people foisted on the rest of the world because they decided to get offended on behalf of a hypothetical group.

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