Slashdot Mirror
Free Software Leadership
GroundBounce writes: "An article at Advogato uses the recent resignation of Christoph Pfister from the Fink project to analyze and highlight the ways in which the free software community often alienates its leaders, and the differences between the Mac shareware and the greater free software communities."
From reading the first bunch of posts here, one would get the impression that leading an Open-Source project is miserable work. In case anyone cares, I'd like to submit a success story
A while back I posted a little code on the net. It was a tiny driver for my Matrox Marvel video capture card. I figured there might be SOMEONE out there who'd find it useful. Well, people grabbed it, started working with it (I only have one video capture card, so there were apparently problems on other people's sysems) and improving it. We set up a CVS server and a mailing list and more people got involved.
After a while, I got kind of tired of the project. The driver has worked for me since day one, and I really didn't have much motivation to do any more coding or "lead" the project. Besides, several people that joined the project knew more about the code than me, so I figured I might as well quietly step away. The project's been going great and continues to grow. I still read the mailing list, but I haven't committed code in months.
I guess the moral of the story is: There may come a time where you are tired of heading up a project, and the best thing to do is to let go of it, and leave it to the more capable (and more enthusiastic) people on the mailing list.