Hi again, I'm back.. and I'll try to answer like I did previously (the long message that disappeared because my accidently close the browser... ) however, I'll probably much less detailed and it will be a shorter version of my previous answer...
so yeah.. thankfully, I'm in a good mood today (no idea why), so I'll try to answer your question as much as possible, trying to make you understand the issue here.. and hopefully, others will use this thread as a reference...
So first, of all, the "delay it one month" is not a policy, it's a joke! Nothing more than a joke.. and yes, you WILL find other open source software using this same 'policy'.. I originally took it after I saw it used by developers of a few other programs...
Anyways, the thing is that we just can't set an ETA... you have to understand that we've already said a few times that aMSN2 will not be ready before 2 to 5 years.. it takes a lot of time and we can't give a release date if we don't know it ourselves!!!
I'll take the example of aMSN 0.98... we had a plan to release it 1 to 2 months max after 0.97... now go look at the release date of 0.97.. it was in august 2007!! It's been 2 years... so what use is it to say "in 2 months" and have no release until 2 years later.. it will only make the users mad and angry and start yelling and getting impatient, etc...
The point is simple, if you want to speed up the release, stop asking about it, just get the code and start working with us, help us fix the bugs and advance to the next release... The reason is that we're all just simple people who do this on their free time, it takes quite a huge amount of time to work on this stuff.. and we have our own lives, we're mostly students who go to school and have a full time job at the same time, others have families, wives, husbands, children, and still work at a full time job.. how much free time does this give us ? not much... All the code we do, as well as the user support on IRC and in the forums, it's all taken on our free time.. so imagine having to answer people 10 times everyday about when you might possibly release a new version when you yourself have no idea, it's really not only annoying, but also a huge waste of time..
I'm sure there's some document out there in the internet, explaining the whole policy of 'delaying one month everytime a user asks'.. there are widely known policies that users need to know and respect with regards to open source software.. for example, you don't go to the developers and say "your program sucks, because it doesn't do X or Y" .. it's useless, you're getting the developer angry while he's doing it for free, you didn't pay for it, you have no right to yell at the developer.. in the same sense, the widely known policies include "never ask for a release date"... just today, i wasted 1 hour writing you the previous message, and probably gonna waste another 30 minutes rewriting it (my fault), but all this time, I could have spent it programming on aMSN... so the very fact that people ask the question is making us waste time, which is why we say "it gets delayed because you asked"...
You have to understand that we're doing this all for free, on our free time, and the only reward is the user's satisfaction and our own... if we were spending 8 hours a day on it, and we have X developers on it, we could probably estimate when the next release will be.. but it is SO unpredictable with the way things are.. you never know if you can spent 0 or 20 hours a week on it this month or the next.. you don't know if this month, you'll have 0 or 30 people who are available to work on it...
It's like I said, we planed for 0.98 one to two months after 0.97 but what happened is that just after the release, we had a huge surge of work done for 1 week, then we had a full 6 months without ANY code change.. because everyone was too busy with their own lives... so 6 months without any changes, you can hardly make a release with that... it really is unpredictable, the next release is always "as soon as possible" but we don't know the answer ourselves, so we can't give one to the users either...
So again, like I said setting an ETA is useless, and even if we can 'delay it', what would the users think if we delay it every month for 2 full years? we would start to answer hundreds of thread every month about "why wasn't it released today as promised"... and then we would waste even more time!
There really is NO obligations from our part to even answer the users.. like I said, it's all free and we get nothing in return, so we have no obligation to either implement a feature or to give support or to answer anyone in the forums, but I like to think that we're nice enough and I want the project to be very close to their users (and I've had a lot of incredible comments from other open source developers with regards to how amazingly the aMSN project is very close to their users), that's why we take the time to answer you guys here...
like WM-666 said, pidgin doesn't even have a forum for their users.. if you go to talk to them in IRC (which I've done), you'll find them extremely arrogant and unhelpful...
You also gave the example of openoffice.. yes, they have a timeline and ETAs, etc.. but that's because they are backed by companies like Novell, IBM or whatever.. there are people who are paid to this, so they can say that in X months, we'll have spent Y hours of work for sure.. with aMSN, we have no way of knowing if we can spend any time working on the project at all...
oh, I've just re-read your post, and I totally forgot about "petty, egotistical people who have been bullied as a child"... well.. what can i say.. I guess you're completely out of line here! I did comment on it in my previous (lost) post, but I forgot what I said, and I don't have any inspiration now, so let's just leave it at that...
Anwyays, I hope you understand us better now, and I'd like to hear what you are your thoughts now that I've explained a bit the situation....
p.s: since we've put that 'policy', people started to understand us, or they started to fear asking the question and we're wasting a lot less time answering that kind of stuff... and we're less annoyed now
edit: oh, something i remember from my previous post.. I said that if you looked in the forum here, you'll see that in the last 2 months I think, you'll see me telling people that 0.98 would be out in "1 week or two" and i meant it, and although i've spent these last months really working hard (had a lot of free time lately) on aMSN, there was just way too much stuff to do that it wasn't released yet.. and unfortunately, we've still got a lot of work to do...
Also, it's useless asking for a "Release", you can just use the SVN version (or git, in the case of amsn2) and be done with it.. a release is nothing more than a specific revision in SVN or GIT...
