Quoting Rowland Penny (rpenny241155@???):

> It is a very stupid organisation that doesn't listen to its users,
> you can make the best thing in the world (and systemd certainly
> isn't that), but if a lot of your users don't want it, you are in
> trouble.

And this is because all 'organisations' (software projects?) have a
pragmatic need to accumulate as many users as possible?

If you think about it, you'll realise that this is completely untrue in
open source, where the zero-sum loyalty game that typifies the
proprietary software market just doesn't apply. The history of open
source is crammed with successful codebase projects that make a group of
devotees happy and meet their needs, and neither feel a need to maximise
adoption nor would particularly benefit from doing so (at least, as far
as they can see).

There are many moves open source organisations make that I'd call
profoundly stupid, and the Debian Project IMO has made some truly epic
mistakes in recent years, but failing to listen to what they quite
reasonably see as outsider advocacy pitches (which you call 'listening
to its users') is not among them.

Separately from and in addition to that, I'll just mention in passing
that trying to harangue groups of volunteers into caring about concerns
_you_ care about and they don't, just doesn't work. Looking at the
train-wreck on debian-user a few years ago (via the Web archives, as I
was never on that damned forum) showed a number of people who appeared
to be failing to understand this basic fact, for years on end.

I actually have a theory about this.

I think a lot of the unpleasant strife on the Internet results from
miscommunication between process people and non-process people.

What I call a 'process person' is one who is comfortable thinking in
terms of stepwise chronologically sequential mechanism. A is a
necessary preconditon of B, which can be made to cause C, all of which
is an efficient path to bring about D. a 'non-process person' is one
whose mind doesn't think that way. Lacking (pick any N) aptitude,
attitude, and/or patience to deal in mechanism, they go around talking
about how wonderful D would be and how something-never-mind-what-and-how
should make D happen.

Process thinkers should be kind to the other folks and say 'You may be
right. D might be lovely, and I do hope you get what you want.'
Non-process thinkers should be understanding of the other folks (the
ones who actually _do_ things) and realise that sometimes they just
aren't going to do D because they'd rather do something else, and stop
getting upset over this.

I do hope you get what you want.