[Scribus] Torture testing Scribus

[Christoph Schäfer]

Am Donnerstag, 23. M?rz 2006 21:00 schrieb 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.

But you have to admit that it's not so easy to donate. I'm still waiting for a 
PayPal link and an account number to allow supporters remitting money. It's 
simply not there, or did I miss something? Maybe the developers could think 
about a non-profit Scribus foundation or something like that. At least German 
donators, including companies, will be able to donate to public benefit 
organisations and use the receipt for their tax return.

>
> Craig

Cheers,

Christoph