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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"."
I also agree with this:
I really hated Internet Explorer. When I heard about Mozilla, I tried Milestone 8 (around 1999), and it was slow as a snail on my poor machine. WTF were they thinking? The Netscape code might have been difficult to maintain, but what really needed a revamp was the html renderer.
The reason Firefox did get a huge market share is not because of the XUL framework, but because it was finished. I'm sure all that delay could've been avoided.
Ok. For those that didn't realize it, that blog entry was from 2003. Today, three years later on, where is the SchoolTool project? Did Mark really learn a lesson and develop a solution or did he just relive a trend he noticed so long ago?
Seems to be a long development cycle for a specialized calendar. I'm glad I'm not paying for it.
Orlowski is miles off.
See how Firefox developed once it came out from under a corporate yoke. All those shiny geek toys (XUL, plugins, etc) started getting the attention they needed instead of making it work on an infinite number of badly written web pages.
Orlowski is just a hack who slags things off on the cusp of thier sucess. Hes turned The Register into a personal rant blogg, dont be suprised when it goes bankrupt.
Mark Shuttleworth on the other hand clearly states the problem, gives a lucid account of its causes, and proposes a solution. Maybe you should read his article and actually learn something.
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
I'm not sure exactly how it went down, but it sounds like he hired a bunch of developers for a project and just sent them off to go do it without leadership. This isn't a problem with open source, it's just a boneheaded decision. When you hire someone you have to train them and tell them what you expect. It's no wonder that they gravitated towards whatever they wanted to do since they had no direction.
You can have all the creativity you want - but without proper leadership, all that effort and talent goes wasted. I have a few creative friends that have all these wonderful ideas - but they have no idea on the concepts of project planning or management of resources. Needless to say, their killer applications are still brain children - and not actually out here where the rest of us can use them.
In that case self-management is the key. I've been there. Working for years in an educational environment where the actual workload was less than 20 hours, I had a lot of freedom to take things in new directions. I ended up coming up with some of my best ideas and was able to develop the discipline to implement them. But it was really hard not to get distracted. You have to develop a manager mentality--be results oriented. As a programmer / designer / creative, sometimes spending 8 hours just researching or learning something is well worth it, but at some point you have to jump in and focus hard on the final product until its done. Then you can go back into creative mode and dream up version 2.0.
Actually, Orlowski reasons for deriding the Mozilla team in "wander[ing] off into Lotus-eating land" are:
"creating esoteric frameworks". Later we learn that means "Creating a neat C++ framework when what the world really needs a non-Microsoft browser is nothing but a deriliction of duty: a piece of vanity code". Except http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/009698 .html/ shows XUL creation was a direct effect of AOL pressure on advertising and netscape portal integration
"note-perfect bug tracking systems that only a nerd could appreciate". Anyone who ever looked at bugzilla's internal knows it's a quick and ugly hack who could never mobilise a whole team for years.
So when Orlowski writes jokingly "corrupt suits at AOL" "betrayed the Great Noble Project" he's right, and when he rants about nerds he's dead wrong (you'll notice once the inspired suits where taken of the picture the nerds did produce a successful browser).
If anything, returning on Orlowski's pontifications today only emonstrates the depths of his prejudices and cluelessness.
Actually, I think, you will be quite surprised to find out that it actually IS number three. No, it's you who will be suprised that it is indeed #3. Simplicity will be chosen by most people each and every time over complexity, and this is proven consistently in the marketplace. You might not agree personally, but that doesn't mean the mass market prefers complexity and too many features.
Funny to see this piece dredged up again. I'm the blogger Mark references in the story, Tom Hoffman, and for the past year and a half I've been managing the renewed SchoolTool development effort, after Steve Alexander created a new Zope 3 based architecture.
It is definitely tricky to manage a project with such broad and lofty goals, and we've still had our share of mis-steps and mis-directions. I have a background as a teacher and self-taught Zope hacker, so I've learned a lot of lessons about software development.
Nonetheless, a useful application is in sight. We'll have a beta this spring and serious testing in real schools in the fall of 2006. One key this time around was keeping the burn rate down and not creating specific expectations in schools and with governments that we subsequently failed to meet.
If you're interested in open source software for schools, check out http://schooltool.org./
The answer is GEGL, a non-existant "shiny geek toy". GEGL is supposed to be some amazing framework that will handle image operations the Right Way. It will make 16-bit color, CMYK, and adjustment layers appear by magic. It will be fast and generalized and light-years beyond anything Adobe has and wash your windows for you. Who knows what it is supposed to do now? Unlike the codebase of GEGL, the legend of GEGL grows by leaps and bounds.
It you read the gimp devel list archives, you'll see many cases of people saying, "I want to code CMYK", or, "I have 16 bit support". The developers always send them away, "You are doing things the Wrong Way, you must work on GEGL instead!" The result is, development is killed.
What of GEGL? Years go by and it's nothing more a "design document" aka Musings of a Lotus-Eater, that hasn't been updated since the Clinton administration. A CVS repository that goes eight months at a time between commits. No code that actually compiles and does anything. It's still just a pipe-dream shiny geek toy.
Mark Shutteworth tried to fund someone to work on GEGL. I imagine nothing ever came of it.