On Thu, 2005-10-13 at 13:06 -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote:
This seems very simple to us, but I've had first hand experience at OSDL with the myriad of ways that companies run into trouble figuring out how to deal with the community.
Well, after reading the e-mail you've forwarded, I'm not optimistic. The reason being that they still seem focused on being in control. Now I don't think they should release a totally random project, but if they are going to never give an outside developer access to their version control, the barrier for contribution is too high. I think we've got roots in a project where one entity controlled the repository and rewrote all the patches ;)
It's in our best interest to help them start communicating with us (if not on this list, then perhaps on some other forum or technology they're more comfortable with), because once that's established, a lot of our concerns can just be worked out normally.
One thing I found interesting in Linus' "Just for Fun" was when he was talking about Netscape open sourcing Mozilla. He mentioned how they still made decisions in conference rooms, and how that made outside contributions impossible. I don't care if it is on this list, but if they're not willing to make their product decisions transparent -- it is going to be difficult for others to get involved.
That is possible; I've invited Charles to encourage one of his engineers, testers, or sysadmins to join the list; if they're on, I hope they'll jump in and say hi.
I hope so too.
I would have to say that I'm not an optimist on this whole thing. I'd love to be proved wrong, but right now, I'm worried about it.
--Ted