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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."
I think one of the secrets of staying sane in Open Source is learning how to ignore people! Just ignore them, you're right, you have NO OBLIGATION TO THEM. You DON'T have to cater to everyone's silly little whim. Learn to use the D key when people are e-mailing you personally and not the support mailing lists and news groups like they should if they had 1/4 of a brain!
Man, if you can't ignore people you're in the wrong community. And if you're not writing the software for yourself... then what the hell are you doing?
Chris, thanks for all the hard work and all, but you'll hear no violins from me.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
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
Muuuuhhhaaaaahahahah.
Not to trivialize it, but from most accounts it sounded like the "Fink dude" was in a "Funk".
He needed a break, so for however long is needed;
"Run fast, run far" and return when you are ready.
If it is not on fire, it is a software problem.
There are an awful lot of small, dead, open source projects out there. I was looking today on Sourceforge for something and row after row of 0.0% project activity hits came up. Maybe this is to do with attention spans, or maybe for smaller projects it is tough putting GPL code out there.
A GPL-ed open source app that I wrote has so far had >1200 downloads in 2 months, yet only six people have fed anything back (five of them were complementary). Admittedly this is on Windows, where maybe there are cultural differences.
When you are charging for your work you can at least look at the cash and feel that you are doing a good job; if you are deliberately setting out to give your work away then all there is in the way of repayment is feedback or help. Maybe that makes people feel uncomfortable to the extent they might rather have paid for the software?
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
Ummmmm, it's already been established that OpenOSX was in no way in violation of the GPL. Cristoph just got his ego bruised when he realised that releasing his code under the GPL does not automatically guarantee that he'll be given credit.
Two problems with this.
1) If he wanted to be given credit for his work that badly, he should have done his homework, and perhaps released his code under a BSD license, which guarantees that he'll be mentioned as the original author. It's not OpenOSX's fault he didn't use his head.
2) If he's in it for the fame and popularity, and not for the idea that the GPL ( and the entire open source movement ) represents, Cristoph should find another line of work -- And apparently, he has.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
This guy and the bonehead who blames UPS for his shitty packaging job should get together and go bowling. After all, they both have exactly what the other wants. One has a working computer system, but no fame. The other has fame, but a dead computer system.
Sounds like a beautiful friendship if you ask me.
Bowie J. Poag
This is not an issue that plagues OSS, it is one that has been present in every workplace in the world. Who has ever worked in an environment where everyone agreed all the time? I personally left a company after disagreeing with some of the stances taken by a manager of mine, and that was in the closed source, commercial world.
The only difference I see is that given the nature of OSS the players tend to have some very strong feelings about the subject material or they wouldn't have started the project to begin with. No one would undertake a project for zero pay, long hours, and constant hand (and brain) cramps just out of the good nature of their heart. They start they projects because they feel they need the tool at hand. When others join the cause, the goals of the project migrate with the masses; which is not always the exact direction the founder may have envisioned.
Given the founders original vision of the project, and the nature of OSS being so visable and publicized today, any falling out amoungst the developers is going to be louder than a closed source model.
But to sum it up; this happens everywhere, it is just that it is more visable for public projects!
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 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.
If you take a group of true fruitcakes, say, the UFO Investigators, they basically "eat their own young" when it comes to competition, grandstanding, ego trips, etc.
Software developers are not so flakey, of course, although some folks would argue otherwise.
Many folks are rather ignorant of this sort of thing, and get blindsided by it. Of course, management books and courses sort of assume that every one is on the same team, and rarely look at the angle where there are competing interests, some of them sometimes rather juvenile.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
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?
I don't think you are very far from what RMS wants. It is just that he has found a way to get there more slowly, and I would say more cleverly. It's a long discussion, really.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Perhaps the problem is that the de-facto leader of the project is the person who initiated it; they might be a good developer but maybe they don't have the organizational/managerial/basic people skills to keep things going smoothly. This is one area (IMO) in which the traditional "corporate" system of separate management and development teams (at least potentially) has an advantage on the OSS model.
Agvogato misspelled his name and then apologized
below in a comment to the article. Too bad they
didn't edit the actual article.
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.
Sometimes I am wondering about the role of leadership in open source software. In a way, at least from my point of view, the leader is typically the chief developer. But isn't there a better way to do it?
You might disagree, which is understandable, but I really think that the open source community could gain a bit by looking some more at the coporate model. (Yes, it does have its flaws, I'll be the first to admit. But there are some good things.)
For example, you might want a project architect. His job isn't to write the code, but to establish the framework and overall direction of the project. The architect gives clear direction on which way the software is going and provides a blueprint for the design.
Or, for example, someone who represents the user community. In contrast to the architect, this representative speaks for the users in terms of what features are most desired, and what bugs need to be squashed the most. And it shields developers from the maddening and schizophrenic voices of the community.
An architect could take the requests of the users, and combine it into the overall vision of the project.
I'm kind of making this up as I go here, but I see some value in the role of a software architect (who understands programming but does not churn code), and a single representative of the user community to deal with developers.
Is this too insane, or niave?
If you take a closer look at those projects, you will find that a lot of the project descriptions tend to sound something like "this project will implement a brand-new, object-oriented, buzzword-compliant operating system with a really cool graphical user interface, all written in a new programming language that I haven't actually designed yet, but it should be really cool and object-oriented."
Annoying people with big ideas and no talent start these projects, and assume that everyone else on the internet is going to do all the real work for them so that they can take the credit.
No wonder they fail.
As for the vast majority of people who download your hard-written code and don't feed anything back, don't feel too bad about that. Most of them are morons, and couldn't give you a single useful suggestion if you put a gun to their head. Just be glad they don't pester you with their "ideas".
The FSF only step in where copyright of the GPL software is assigned to them. There are legal reasons for doing this, because to bring an action you have to have 'standing' in the action i.e. you have to be an aggrieved party, not a bystander. There are good reasons for this; I understand in some countries (Germany) you can be a b**t**d and bring a case whether or not you have standing - witness Adobe and KIllustrator, and the bunch of ambulance chasers who brought the action.
I'm not entirely on Fisks side; my impression from his resignation letter is that he came up with a great idea for an Open Source project but was not very good at managing the project. I'm sure other Open Source developers get similar hassles but the better ones find some way of keeping the s**t at arms length by means of for example bug submission procedures, dividing the work amongst other developers etc. Most of his complaints in the letter were along those lines. If he managed it well, he could've had the exposure he (justly) deserved and stood mainly out of the firing line of c**p.
Funnily enough, the Advogato article has a letter from a manager offering to manage the project. I'm a little leery of real managers, viewing them in much the same way Scott Adams does in Dilbert! But it seems projects do require an engineer with a talent for organisation. I'm under the impression one reason KDE appears to be succeeding is that the organisation is much better than most Open Source Projects. [Maybe what we need is a group of Germans in charge of every project!]
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
And what I've noticed is that it's usually at commercial prices. Low-end commercial prices, to be sure, but it ain't cheap. And despite your implicit assertion to the contrary, freeware applications of any value are few and far between.
This has been one of my disappointments with my iBook. You can accuse me of being cheap, with some justification--but I look at it as being honest: I don't want to use unregistered shareware, so I'll certainly look for freeware first. And I usually won't find it. I usually won't even find up-to-date ports of common cross-platform applications like Vim and Emacs.
Granted, I've had other disappointments like the fact that MacOS 9 isn't much more advanced internally than System 7 was, that the iBook's battery design seems to be flamingly stupid, and that MacOS X is targeted to machines much faster than mine (note I didn't say that was a flaw, just a disappointment). But the Mac community as a whole seems to be less interested in the 'gift economy' than Windows programmers, much less Linux and BSD folks.
Leaders are, by definition, people who get others to do what is needed. Since, in the free software community, people do more or less what they want, leaders are completely unnecessary.
What free software needs are not leaders, but coordinators and administrators, people who keep things organized. And this means hard work, such as maintaning the CVS tree, keeping track of updates, making sure the project website has the right links, etc.
If you do all that work, and more, you are sure to be recognized as THE leader for the project. After all, who is it that puts people's names in the files?
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.
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
The thing is, it takes a certain type of person to run a project which is big, but offers little tangible reward beyond knowing you did it. That type of person is first and foremost enthusiastic. They also tend to have an unusually high level of skill and/or talent in the area concerned. And they also tend to be people who care about doing a good job.
Such people will automatically take some responsibility for the project they oversee. When people slam the project, or worse yet, slam the volunteer running it with personal criticisms, it hurts. You can say "it shouldn't" or "ignore it" all you like, it still hurts. People capable of ignoring such criticism completely are rarely enthusiastic or skilled enough to be there in the first place.
Sometimes, inevitably, it gets too much. After months of putting effort in, without a drop of credit, these people crack and leave. What do you expect? The least you could do is respect their wish to have their say, just once, as they bow out. They've earned that right, and you have no right to have a go at them for it.
I've been in a similar situation, though not in a software context. I know how this guy feels. I'm betting you haven't, and you'd look at things a whole lot differently if you had. As you say, it's a thankless job. Maybe that's because people like you are too busy having a go to say "thank you".
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
When I was (along with some other people, but mostly me) running CVS development, our most popular download was the Windows client (command line at the time, although WinCVS later got popular). Yet very little of the mailing list traffic, submitted patches, and the like were for Windows. I suppose one could point to reasons like whether people had the right compilers for Windows (cygwin wasn't as mature then as it is now, so we had both cygwin and Visual C++ ports). But I still would vote for the cultural explanation. The model of Windows freeware or shareware is basically a gift from the author to the user, whereas Unix free software is more often seen as a (potential) collaboration in which the users contribute.
From the article:
Can anyone take this guy's side for a minute? Play devil's advocate, and tell me what basis there is for his comment? Apart from Jamie & Mozilla, I haven't seen a lot of high-profile dropouts. ESR and tons -- tons -- of other leaders/developers appear to be moving forward en masse and full steam ahead. There's Miguel, Alan & the new 2.4 maintainer (remember when the only kernel guy was Linus? Nowadays it seems like Linus could be hit by a train and Linux would survive.), Bruce (at HP now, right?), even Rob, etc.
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