Slashdot Mirror
Distributed Development, with Karl Fogel
phyjcowl writes "Karl Fogel is a founding developer of the Subversion project. In the following interview he covers social aspects of coordinating developers as well as the difficulties and advantages of managing an open source, distributed development project. Karl explains the inception of the Subversion project, what it has required to build its community, and what he has learned in order to successfully maintain it."
First post
f
p
!
fail!
omg gaping gape gaping ooomg!1oneone
Install bugmenot FFS.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Slashdot Declaration of Independence
When other tech companies severely take advantage of their customers, dismissing
any notion of customer service or satisfaction, they are no doubt subject to criticism by
the ever vigilant masses of Slashdot. Why should Slashdot itself be any different?
We must remember that slashdot makes money off subscriptions and ad revenues.
There is no altruistic motivation behind their actions, and as such, the Slashdot editors
are not so much editors as they are salesman.
In addition, we must remember that Slashdot is NOT a legitimate journalistic endeavor.
These so-called editors did not attend journalism school, nor is there a centralized forum
to air grievances done on the site. To the slashdot editors, their words are final, and cannot
be criticized.
We put forth three major grievances we have with Slashdot and its editors.
1. Complete lack of dupe checking and article checking:
Imagine a newspaper that routinely prints stories from months, weeks and even days
before. Image the same newspaper placing all import on the headline, rather than the
content. Surely this newspaper would not last long. If the readers would write in to the
editor to complain, surely they wouldn'thave chastised by the editor.
Yet, as we are all aware of, this is the biggest problem facing slashdot. Although there
is no editorial section in which we may submit letters, we have the option to directly
emailing the editors. What happens when we do? We are scolded and our opinions
are labeled as hate mail.
http://www.anti-slash.org/injustices/CmdrTaco/taco _dupe_lash_out/
2. Increased commercialization behind articles:
Many recent articles seem to be advertisement for products, and not really newsworthy.
Other articles (including the recent "discovery" of month old google products) try to get Slashdot in
good graces with particular organizations.
Here are more examples of such "Slash-vertisement:"
http://www.anti-slash.org/injustices/other/extreme tech_slashvertisement/
3. Blatant editor errors:
The role of an editor is to oversee the final content of text before it goes into publication. That, believe
it or not, includes checking minor errors in HTML and spelling, in addition to larger errors.
There are several instances of items just not being checked:
http://books.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=157102&c id=13170467
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=157 209&cid=13177798
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=157125 &cid=13172520
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=156961&c id=13159282
Where as grievance one details the question of "newsworthiness" of an article, grievance three
points out instances where article and summary do not agree, in addition to the smaller problems
of spell checking etc.
Resolution:
We do not have to stand for this lack of respect toward the customer. There are alternatives to slashdot.
http://www.digg.com/ has had good reviews from the slashdot crowd.
If leaving slashdot all together seems too extremist you can start demanding better treatment from the
editors. Demand a public forum where we can discuss our issues with slashdot, and see that they
are resolved.
Demand more from this money-making machine! You are all its customers. You
with the Number YOU LOVED THAT its corpse turned