Shuttleworth on Open Source Development

An anonymous reader writes "Mark Shuttleworth (retired cosmonaut and Ubuntu daddy) has written an informative blog entry about the problems associated with open source development. He found that paying geeks to code without assigning them managers lead to "shiny geek toys", rather than the product he was actually paying for. Shuttleworth says that left-field thinking is required when it comes to managing open source teams. See also Andrew Orlowski's analysis of why AOL eventually killed the Netscape project from a few years ago, where he describes Mozilla developers as "wandering off into Lotus-eating land"."

Comments

Old article

[Proud like a god]

From the article:

This entry was posted on Friday, November 21st, 2003 at 6:48 pm...

A little out of touch maybe?

Re:Exactly...

[Stoned4Life]

I think what is, not so much overlooked, but not always considered when thinking of Open Source projects, is that these developers are not working on this Full-Time (usually). This is a project divided among a group who all either share an interest in the resultant, or were brought together to contribute their knowledge in certain fields. It is unlikely that they would have previously held management positions or have acted as project leaders- not to just to govern themselves, but to hold a leadership over a group. What needs to be added to the equation is a person who has experience in managing people to reach a certain goal. I think he had some pros and cons in relying on the group to choose the route to take in designing his project. What needs to be laid out before diving in is the issues that you want to tackle, the ways you plan on tackling them, and the resources you have available. I guess I'm just preaching to the choir when I say all this, but that's just how it has to be. In the end there has to be just one person to make a decision.

You can't have it both ways

[MikeRT]

Developers of OSS often forget that they have two choices in most cases:

1) Meet the needs of their users and especially those who want to use their products
2) Meet their own needs

OSS developers need to stop using the argument that "feature X is missing because we're hobbyists." If you want to compete with the big guys, you need to give your users the features they want. It's certainly your right to prioritize based on your wants, but don't kid yourselves. If you don't give the users what they want... they'll leave.

I spoke with the head of SchoolTool

[xeno-cat]

I spoke with the project manager for SchoolTool last year when he was at an educational conference in my area. He said that what Mark basicaly learned with the first (Java based) SchoolTool is not to start a project and then go into space. Goo advice for anyone committing to large product development.

The current SchoolTool is being written in Zope3 and is under tighter development control.

This is very old news and does not reflect the current understandings of either SchoolTool or Marc Shuttleworth. This article could also be called "My first babysteps in the universe of Open Source development", file under ancient history.

Kind Regards