At 2005 04 27 23:19, Alfonso Guerra wrote:
Greetings,
<snip>
Maybe Alfonso won't be reading this. I bet he will. Whatever.
Rant-like attitude aside, he makes some points worthy of discussion. I
migrated from eGW as well, partially because of the license, but
largely because I asked about contributing to an eGW module, got a
response that was worthy of a politician (many words, zero content),
pressed my point, was accused of having a bad attitude (since when is
asking "is there a specification and a project plan?" a bad
attitude?), and bailed on the project despite the fact that it's got
some nice features that pgpGW doesn't have (yet). I'll freely admit
that I too have considered just going in and making changes and
creating "my" branch. This is partially because I might be duplicating
effort (there is little way to tell) and partially knowing that the
odds of having those changes embraced are slim, since they might step
on some undocumented plan discussed in IRC, or they might violate some
unwritten philosophical principle.
But Alfonso is dead wrong about open source. Competing forks are good
things in the end; eventually a few will come to dominate, and then
the best features will migrate into the dominant products. It's a
messy process, but competition is evolution, and evolution is messy.
It also takes time, and developers aren't known for their patience. If
you can't / won't contribute or wait, or if you don't have the
conviction to argue that your changes are worthy, then maybe an
extensible commercial product is a better option.
One thing is clear to me though. Really successful OSS projects have
strong supporting infrastructure. At this point in OSS evolution, this
usually means the project has a single corporate sponsor with a
strategic motive or a profit motive, and that motive focuses the
project (for example eclipse.org). But that's not always the case;
some times there's a strong individual who can put all of his or her
efforts into it (the Linux kernel would be a good example here).
This is what projects that suffer from forking, and from
single-implementation dialects seem to be missing: Some kind of clear
set of goals, objectives, time lines (even if they are subject to
ongoing revision), an easy way to look at features that have been
suggested and their status (new, approved (with a target release and
estimation of effort required), rejected (with detailed rationale so
people can learn)), an easy way to make a small contribution,
documentation that makes it easier to do a little bit of work without
becoming an API guru, frequent commits, clear targets for releases...
in other words a lot of stuff developers would rather not do when
there's code to be written!
Every project I've worked on from time to time has a couple of guys
who just can't resist taking shots at each other. Any imperfection by
one gets a nasty remark in response. Every possible solution requires
some interpretation and evaluation, and of course the other guy always
makes an inferior choice. It's a great ego-fest to them, but merely
distracting and tedious to the rest. In the end it's just noise and if
it's discouraged, it goes away sooner or later. We just need to keep
stepping in and saying "have your pissing match in private, please",
or worst case, moderate the messages out and remove their audience. We
have a bit of that now and man is it dull reading.
Let's not forget that phpGW is a pretty cool product, and something
the contributors can be extremely proud of. Sure there's lots of work
to do, lots of features to add, and bugs to fix. Maybe nobody as the
time, tools, or inclination to step up and manage the development more
aggressively (before anyone jumps on this, please note I'm talking
about managing the project, not managing the people -- these are
vastly different things). But the project has come a hell of a long
way without that kind of effort, and there's nothing to say that it
won't continue to do so. I can understand Alfonso's frustration, but
posting a diatribe and running away is hardly useful. It's also not
useful to just discount what he was trying to say, just because he
said it in an inappropriate way. Better to adapt, evolve, and just
stay focused on producing better software.
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