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Planet KDE: Some room to play
Quoting: Some room to play – Nuno-Icons —
And its something I have been thinking about for some time, the place we leave for this kind of work, particularly in open source.
OSS has a rather unusual relationship with creativity. We can inspect how things work, modify them, share our experiments, and build on each other's work. There is room for someone to follow an idea simply because it interests them, it does not require a market research, there is no need to demonstrate that it will appeal to the largest possible audience before writing the first line of code or in my case drawing the first squigly line in inkscape.
And yet, sometimes our projects can be surprisingly cautious about appearance. We globaly spend a great deal of effort making software coherent and predictable, which is understandable and a good thing when you have to maintain it for years and support a wide range of users. But those concerns can also make it difficult to explore alternatives. The existing conventions gradually become the boundaries of what we consider reasonable. Trust me I was that guy shooting down what I believed were bad ideas. because of all the work that it would create, or because it was just 2 insane etc....