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."

Comments

OSS-Leaders

[pete-classic]

I (being an alienated former project leader) have put together a mailing list I call OSS-Leaders.

I'm still trying to get it off the ground, but there are one or two guys you may have heard of on the list . . .

The idea is to provide a place for project leaders to exchange thoughts and ideas strictly with their peers. I hope to distill some of this discussion into some sort of "OSS Project Leadership HOWTO."

If you lead (or recently lead) an OSS project, check it out.

-Peter

The problem is

[Chardish]

It only takes one stupid decision or one time where your development community has a good idea you try to repress for your community to decide they don't respect you anymore.

Bottom line? In OSS there are no leaders, there are only people more knowledgeable and experienced than others. If you try to lead and you fail then you suppress ideas, and that causes forking, and then your project is doomed.

-Evan

Sounds like I got lucky...

[larien]

The only time I ever led an open source project was for the Solaris plugin for XMMS. I got zero flames during the duration of doing it, and plenty compliments (thanks for writing this, etc). Other people came along with problems, but they were generally valid complaints. Very few people had stupid questions; those I just pointed to the FAQ.

Of course, mine was a fairly small project with less visibility, but I was still getting over 1000 downloads (as per the web logs) of each new version, so there were a significant number of users. Actually, the number of downloads helped give me a nice warm fuzzy feeling; "look at all these people using something I helped write!".

In the end, I passed control to the central XMMS team as I moved jobs and didn't have a SPARC at my desk. However, that was always my end goal, to have it in such a state that it could be integrated.

Another Cause

[NitsujTPU]

Another cause of this is, not to be offensive to anybody out there, the heterogenous nature of the talent in the open source community.

My experience has been that unless I knew the people that I tried to develop with something ahead of time (IE, someone I chatted with regularly on perlmonks or irc or something), the odds were that I would end up with a few really talented people and a lot of people with little talent (but much ego), and a rather precarious social situation.

In the end it comes down to a shutdown in progress so as not to bruise any egos. Eventually with everybody packing up and going home.

Also, since nobody closese, scraps, and deletes projects on sourceforge, there are a good number that are just out there for the web space that will never actually change again, or that failed long ago that were never removed.

Oh well, it's still a good system.

You guys don't know shareware on the Mac

[Zoop]

Apparently you Linux types think "Hey, check out my L337 Hearts shareware for Windoze, a mere $117.85 and it's yours to play again after a 6 day trial" is what shareware is or should be.

Bullhockey. Shareware on the Mac, which, contrary to advogato's assertion, cares mightily about attribution and credit, to the point that they use, oh, I dunno...COPYRIGHT licenses to ensure they get credit.

Most of this shareware, and a boatload of freeware, some put out by commercial companies, is not time-limited and requires the Mac community to express appreciation in a way that apparently the Napsterites can't be bothered--you know, paying for it? You can use Graphic Converter (a tool that gives the GIMP a run for its money) without ever paying for it. However, I coughed up the $35 to the lone guy who maintains it because it's a damn useful program and has helped me out of spots where Photoshop has failed. In turn, he maintains a release schedule and responsiveness that puts the majority of open source projects I've seen to shame. Oh, and my license is good in perpetuity.

Do I get to see the code? With some freeware programs, yes. Others, no. But then, my coding skills lie more toward Web programming and Java, so I'm not sure I'd be able to do that much with the code, and here's a nasty little truth: neither do most people in the Linux community.

The communities are similar in many points: a small group of programmers do the bulk of the work. Most users don't know how to program and are frequently clueless. Most users tend to report bugs and nothing else. Most users tend not to contribute patches. Some offer to and are brushed away by the maintainer/programmer.

However there are some differences the Linux community might not like to think about. And as a 3-years plus Linux user, I can say that in general, Mac shareware is far less buggy and thousands of times more usable than its Free Software compatriots, despite the lack of peer review of the code. Mac users tend to show appreciation to these programmers in a way that Linux types tend to only show to Red Hat or some other distribution maintainer, not the project maintainers: paying for it. Not everybody, not even most people, but enough that some of these packages have been around over a decade and are still being developed despite relying on single person.

Am I saying the Mac shareware way is better? Not really--it's better at certain things, but has weaknesses that Free Software doesn't. But it has strenghts that Free Software doesn't, either. To see it mindlessly bashed by pots referring to the dark coloration of kettles has been irritating, to say the least.

The whole tone of this discussion has been characterized by ignorant flaming, starting with CP's note and emails and continuing with Slashdot's libelous headline. You really might try to understand the Mac way before you start whining...after all, you're still trying to copy our user interface quality after all these years--we might have something to bring to the table. We instinctively know good UI, something that the Windoze commuity, from which most of you come, does not.

You can learn from other cultures, or you can flame them. Guess which one you're becoming as guilty of as the users who whined without bug reports to CP?

Re:Feedback as repayment

[aozilla]

Besides this, I know several people who are not coders, but still can tweak a program to make a minor modification. And even for those with zero programming knowledge, if the program is open source you know you could find someone to fix it if there's a relatively simple problem and the original author is out of business or otherwise not interested.

There's an art to criticism, though...

[wrinkledshirt]

I'm tired of developers taking criticism so damn personally and not seeing it for what it is when they really shouldn't. (not to sound harsh, but really enough of the silly "artiste" type rants). If you're getting a lot of heat and you can't take it, it's probably best to step back quietly.

While I agree that a certain amount of backbone with regards to criticism is necessary to grow as a creative type, there are some people who are so unschooled at constructive criticism that if I were a developer, and all the feedback I was getting was "this suxors" or whatnot, I'd probably leave in a fury, too.

In a parallel to this, in creative writing workshops (and before people say anything about writing being artsy and coding being analytical, there is a HUGE amount of craft that goes into writing), the best criticism doesn't try to figure out whether or not something is good or bad, but instead tries to figure out what it IS, and what the developer has in mind, and what steps need to be taken to get from where it is now to where the developer wants to go with it.

That's not to say that end-user criticism isn't necessary -- of course it is. But that's an entirely different level of criticism that developers need, and usually, that's not helpful in the design stages. Usually, in an attempt to sound open-minded about their work, a person will welcome any and all criticism, and that's a bit of a mistake if the person doesn't know what sorts of grains of salt to take with every bit of advice they get. You have to try to meet them halfway.

This is just general stuff I've picked up, probably not applicable to this particular situation.