[Scribus] Torture testing Scribus

[Craig Bradney]

On Thursday 23 March 2006 20:43, DaleCoz at aol.com wrote:
> In a message dated 3/23/2006 4:57:50 AM Central Standard Time,
>
> scribus-request at nashi.altmuehlnet.de writes:
> > >One girl wrote me a note saying that Scribus developers should be
> > >hunted down and strung up.
> >
> > Unfortunately, some people tend to bite you if you hand them a gift.
> > It's usually a sign of missing self worthiness - it leads these people
> > to not to see the value of other people's work.
> >
> > Bye, Tino.
>
> In this case I think it was more a matter of the girl not quite
> understanding the nature of Open Source software.  I don't think she
> understood that Scribus developers are voluntarily giving their time and
> effort for the good of the community.  Plus she was frustrated because she
> really wanted to do a good job and the other two people in her group didn't
> care about quality.  As a result she had to do far more than her share of
> the work, including all of the layout work.  When Scribus didn't do what
> she expected it to do she became more frustrated.  I did explain that the
> version of Scribus we were using was a fairly early development version,
> and I hope she will look at Scribus again in six months or so, because
> based on the roadmap and the rate at which it has been improving Scribus
> will undoubtedly be much more usable by then.
>
> To be honest, I found 1.3.2 very usable with the few exceptions I noted,
> but I'm used to learning software and I'm used to finding ways of working
> around bugs or limitations.

If you get the chance to explain.. mention a couple of things that might put 
things in perspective:

1) Everyone learnt the software they now know at some time. At that time, they 
surely took some time to learn it. Expecting to know how Scribus does things 
the first time or within a very short period is somewhat unrealistic.

2) Adobe and Quark and all the other commercial software companies spend 
millions of dollars, yearly, and have done so for many many years with many 
many developers. Scribus is 4 years old, and now has about 8 people 
constantly working on it in their free/not-so-free time, with a very helpful 
contributor base I must add. Money so far received to support this effort is 
a **lot** less than one full time commercial developer's annual pay for one 
year.

Craig
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