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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"."
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.
From the article:
This entry was posted on Friday, November 21st, 2003 at 6:48 pm...
A little out of touch maybe?
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.
Do ya think? How long did it take him to reach that conclusion?
Seriously folks, this is a given and one of the main reasons I don't buy into all the hype about the electronic toy du jour. Everytime I see an article somewhere which says that 'X' is the latest electronic whiz toy that everyone must have I just roll my eyes and move along. (As a side note to marketers, I don't watch your commercials or read your flyers in the paper. You may now explode with unmitigated rage because I'm stealing from you for not watching what you produce.)
I don't want to be forced to buy a DVD player which plays DVDs, mpegs, connects to the net, calls my vet or offers me advice on what wine goes well with acadian rigatoni. I want the machine to play DVDs. Period.
By their very nature geeks (true geeks) will shovel every bell and whistle into a device they can get away with because that is what they do. They want to see how much cruft they can tack onto the hardware simply to see if it can be done. Top that off with manuals (the paper ones if you're lucky enough to get one) which are so poorly written and obtuse that the average user has to take lessons to learn how to program their device, and the market becomes filled with devices whose half-life is as long as the life of a fruit fly.
To all who produce this crap, here's a hint: Stop making a swiss army knife out of every product. If you absolutely must put tinsel on the tree, make three trees. The first is bare bones (i.e. just a cell phone. no music, games, etc). The second has a few more items (include games and music). The third has everything (bleeding edge). If you check your sales figures you'll be surprised to learn which one sells the best (hint: it's not number three).
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I agree with most of what he said, except I don't think its limited to open source projects. I have seen that on purely commercial context as well. The problem is that you *need* some kind of "geek toys" occasionnally, because they sometimes give birth to a very valuable technology (I've seen that many times). That's a complex task to find the fair balance between what is reasonable/valuable and what is not in term of focus diversion, and that's a hell of a management task to deal with people who can't see that balance (either way).
It sounds like he hired a team of talented but flakey developers and is generalizing this to all OSS development. I don't think the problem has anything to do with OSS - it has to do with a team of guys thinking they have free reign to do what they want with no expectations, deadlines or oversight.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
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.
This has nothing to do with Open Source. It is about trying to develop a product without a spec., without an architect, without management and without a timeline. Kind of like pointing a group of carpenters at an empty lot and telling them to build a school.
It wouldn't be any more or less successful at Microsoft, IBM or SAS.