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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
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
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.
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?
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?