We want to take our current content and all the stuff that matters to this community and deliver it on a site that still speaks to the interests and habits of our current audience, but that is, at the same time, more accessible and shareable by a wider audience.
hints at a very clear requirement from the customer and incremental changes won't make it. They want something like TechCrunch with that all gray design? See how they look similar. Lucky us Dice still doesn't require us to sign in with facebook, disqus, livefyre to comment (TC periodically changes the comment hosting provider).
UI designers are paid to design. What gives them more money: working for one year on a complete redesign that pisses off everybody with the exception of their self-deluded customer or telling the customer "if it's not broke don't fix it"? Even if one designer gives the right anwer and moves on to another project sooner or later they'll find a designer that will accept to work on it. Way sooner than later, actually.
That logic applies to Slashdot, Unity, Gnome 3, Win 8, etc.
BSD is for people that are happy if somebody takes their code, improves on it and don't share the improvements when they distribute the improved code in binary format. For me that's working for free for somebody and that's not fair. Obviously corporations like BSD precisely for that reason and I don't understand why anybody would want to help them.
GPL mandates that if they distribute the improved binaries they have to share the improved source code. So I worked for free but I get the improvements back and that's a fair exchange. Obviously corporations are less happy with that because they also help their competitors (but their competitors would help them back).
That said, many developers are paid to work on BSD or GPL projects nowadays and they don't have a word in the choice of the OSS license.
Not volunteers but paid developers. This is a common misconception. Check this post for a quick summary of the contributors to the Linux kernel. Linux and many big open source projects started as volunteers's efforts and eventually turned into joint ventures between companies ruled by FOSS licenses instead of by thousands of pages of contracts. Shared development is a major money saver for all parties involved and is a very efficient way to invest resources.
The same applies to distributions, which are ofter owned or substantially backed by for profit companies (Canonical, Red Hat, etc).
/rant-mode Nevertheless even paid developers have schedules. I just wonder why nobody's schedule includes this 2007 Thunderbird bug. Well, maybe I'll have to wait for the 12th year or learn the relevant technologies and fix it myself (won't happen, i got other stuff to do.)
What I appreciate with Linux and open source in general is that they have public bug trackers. I can open bugs, vote them up, contribute information, see how fixes progress. Bugs in closed source programs and OS are usually managed in a very opaque way. Those money you pay don't buy you any insight unless you pay really big money and get into some special support program.
Variables don't; constants aren't.