Mea Culpa - I was wrong

[Richard Laager]

On Fri, 2007-10-12 at 02:40 -0700, Charliep wrote:
> I believe that the utility of these icons is from a customer acquisition /
> customer migration point of view.

This assumes that gaining users is somehow our goal. You refer to them
as "customers" but that's not really relevant--nobody is paying us.

For me personally, I'm just trying to make the IM client I use the best
one for my needs (and my co-workers, etc.). If other people like that,
that's excellent. I love to include ideas and features from other
people, as that provides basically free benefits to me. I don't mind
helping users with bugs, as fixing bugs before I hit them is useful and
helping others is important for the community. After all, I like it when
developers of other projects that I use help me with bugs. Now, I also
enjoy writing things that are useful to large numbers of people, that's
true. But I'm not in this to gain every last user I can.

If we were a commercial project, then we'd be adding features left and
right to attract users. Each of these would increase the size of the
codebase, increasing maintenance costs and the bug count. Ninety percent
of the users use ten percent of the features. If you target the
majority, you can cut your work tenfold. The other 10% can use a client
that caters to their needs or use/write plugins to do what they need.

> My repeated point is that the engineering cost to include this feature will
> not harm the existing userbase and the engineering requirements are
> relatively low.

In this case, you're probably right about the engineering requirements,
though I would caution you against making these assumptions unless
you've actually done an analysis of the code (and maybe you have here, I
don't know). Additionally, it is still our view (or at least mine) that
this feature is useless, so even one line of code is too much
maintenance for something that has no purpose.

This feature ("protocol icons") *exists now*. Someone wrote a clean
patch and we accepted it some time ago. I think that was a mistake, as
those people who were whining about the feature probably now feel
validated, which is a dangerous thing (i.e. they'll do that again the
next time they want a feature). I believe the primary motivation for
accepting it was to stop the complaining that was dragging on our time.
That said, the feature is here, so check the box and let's all get on
with our lives.

Richard
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