May 18, 2007
Pidgin doesn’t fly very high…
So I installed Pidgin (formerly known as Gaim) today and I noticed that the protocol Icons were gone. All users from all IM services now have the same icon.
Despite users listing a bunch of good reasons in a bug posted because of the removal of this feature they keep on getting asked the question “but why do you need it?”, talk about being thick skulled (see for yourself). They also closed the bug from further comments and a bug that was later opened to request for re-adding of protocol icons got closed as a duplicate of a bug on which people could no longer comment (but which just got re-opened I noticed).
I must say I was quite shocked by the reaction of the Pidgin developers (or some of them at least) and their total lack of trying to see the points being made.
But that’s not all, in the ChangeLog they also managed to trample the feet of Slackware developers and users (see this mailinglist post).
I really don’t get it, I thought Free and Open Source software were a community effort and feedback of the users was essential in this effort, but instead they choose to ignore their users in such a harsh way, it’s good to see that they have reopened bug #1108 as to at least allow some form of discussion, but the single mindedness of some of their developers is quite disturbing. It’s like they don’t want to see the points being made and keep on replying the same over and over again.
The attack on Slackware was totally unwarranted and very low to the ground in my humble opinion and worthy of an apoligy if you ask me.
I really hope they manage to rectify these issues as I really liked Gaim as an application, but given these recent events my faith in the project has sustained quite a dent…
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