[Gnu-arch-users] leadership meets marketing (repl to Anand)

[Thomas Lord]

>> == Tom
>> The way I see it, "leadership" in the FOSS community is celebrated
>> in terms of who can attract the most followers, more than anything
>> else.   

> == Anand

> [....]  It's really about providing feedback - any at all - to people
who
> (attempt) to contribute.

That's the Collabnet line, originating in "Cathedral and Bazaar"
thinking.   It's a popular rhetorical construction.

When you say that FOSS "leadership" is really *about* providing
feedback one ought to ask what the nature of this use of "about" is
and one what your definition of "leadership" is.   Personally, 
I think we are seeing a conflation of "leadership" as ordinarilly
used by humans and "leader", as used in marketing:

If you look at what Collabnet is actually accomplishing for themselves
or what Unbuntu is doing -- this is "leadership" that is *about* the 
accumulation of private benefit by the development and spending of
social capital.   Of late, with Collabnet's training services or
Ubuntu's "bounty" program[1], there is even a kind of franchising 
going on -- a cult-like spreading of techniques and promotion of 
secondaries down a pyramid of power.

Where I come from, we don't call that "leadership", we call it
"gladhanding" and "fraud".

An opposite conclusion might have been reached:  if volunteers
thus attracted were exchanged high quality education for their
labors and if their work product added up to something of really
lasting quality we might recast the whole thing as a generously
operated open university -- perhaps, as Anand puts it, in another
reality.

    
[note [1]: Canonical's is the bounty program that when confronted with
 a student-internship level of compensation from Google frets that
 even that level will set unrealistic expectations for the community
 and that those expectations will "have to managed":

        "One minor issue for us it that the reward offer is quite
        sizable, and was, in most cases, larger than what the bounty
        would have fetched in the usual Bounty system employed within
        Ubuntu," Ubuntu's Weideman said.

        "This expectation will need to be managed."

        http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/10792_3547611_2

 Google paid $4,500 USD for essentially two months of work.  That
 translates to an annual salary of $27,000 which is far below
 market rates for skilled programmers in the U.S.  That's upper
 range for baristas (who additionally get tips and, at the better
 shops, benefits).  It's a plausible level for a student internship
 but it's not, especially for a professional who pretty much *has*
 to maintain their own cache of computing systems, and especially
 for anyone hoping to support any part of a family, a living wage.

 Ubuntu aims to pay less, to a fraction of their contributors --
 whilst "managing expectations".   And all as part of a system for
 collecting as much volunteer labor (taking it from established 
 public projects when necessary) as they can -- *as the means of
 developing their products*.]


> While most of the discussion here has revolved around other co-
developers
> failing to get feedback.  You've also left out the fact that user
> feedback (via bug reports, etc.) were essentially dropped on the
floor.

Much of it was of poor quality.   A few things weren't and I have
acknowledged those things getting dropped while explaining why.

It was never my goal to be another Robert Collins or Karl Fogel
and I've been explaining why.



> That, more than anything else, is why I switched from using tla to
baz.

> Personally I feel that once a project has reached a large enough size
that
> you have a few (i.e. 4 or more) contributers; feedback rather than
code
> should have a higher priority for any maintainer.

See, marketing works.

 
-t