I?m a bit taken aback by this post by Jason Harris over on the KDE Developer?s Journals site. Harris says that ? KDE, like many other open-source projects, doesn?t really need users at all, whether they are poisonous or not.?
Now, a qualifier ? Harris' post is provoked by a discussion of ?poisonous? users, i.e., those select few users who turn up and (intentionally or not) do ?contribute? to the project in the form of dissonance and conflict, but the idea that open source doesn?t need users is one that should be strongly refuted.I think virtually everyone agrees that projects would be better off without the trolls, griefers, and assorted characters whose presence adds up to a drag on the project rather than just a passive consumer of code or fan of the project.
