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Conflicting Goals Create Tension in OSS Community
An anonymous reader writes "Mark Shuttleworth, of Ubuntu, has a post up meant to clear the air and clarify the project's place in the Debian community. He's specifically referring to comments made by Matthew Garrett earlier this month." From the post: "A little introspection is healthy, and Debian will benefit from the discussion. Matt is to be credited for his open commentary - a lesser person would simply have disengaged, quietly. I hope that Matt will in fact stay involved in Debian, either directly or through Ubuntu, because his talent and humour are both of enormous benefit to the project. I also hope that Debian developers will make better use of the work we do in Ubuntu, integrating relevant bits of it back into Debian so as to help uplift some of those other peaks - Xandros, Linspire, Maemo, Skolelinux and of course Etch."
Conflicting Goals Create Tension in OSS Community
Yeah, anyone who's ever gotten even remotely involved in wikipedia could have seen this one coming a mile away. This is why, at work, you have "project managers", that have final say (and yet, also take the burden and responsibility of making decisions).
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IMHO, Gnu/Linux on the desktop still kinda sucks right now, but it is advancing rapidly. This makes me want to upgrade my distribution to get the latest and greatest, because it fixes features I really want (multimedia these days). We are quickly getting to a place where most the needs of average users will be well met. Then I won't mind if Debian is a little behind. It's like Windows XP being good enough that most people don't really care about upgrading to Vista. I can't wait until we are in that place, and I hope that then, the impedus to move forward so rapidly is lightened enough to relieve some of the stress on the Debian devs, allowing them more time to work through some of these issues.
Unresolvable egos have killed many a commercial project stone dead (especially when the subcontractor thinks it knows what the prime contractor wants rather than actually doing what they're told by the relevant subject metter experts).
Unfortunatly along with outstanding coding skills the OSS comunity has its share of egos, and as with an OSS project your job (usually) isn't on the line you can make your point more forceably and with less tact than in a work situation. The only problem is alot of the time both sides of a row are right - just unable to see the common ground and resolve their egos for the good of the project.
I do wonder whether some of this is down to lack of face to face in person meetings between the various parties...
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
Intresting post, but may I point out that Slashdot doesn't need to pander to people any more? They can post more or less anything they want and they'll find it very difficult to drive the fanbase off. Slashdot is just a really large forum to most people, we come here for the latest (ahem) news/waste a bit of time and take part in the commenting. Slashdot isn't a news site in the traditional sense, it's a blog with thousands of people reading it.
Does all this matter in all honesty? To most people probably not. We're a bunch of nerds discussing things from America's movement into a police state like society to the latest gimmick software. Both cannot be "news for nerds" and "stuff that matters" in all cases.
As for addressing the article it's self. OSS does have 3 sides and we have to remember this. As long as we keep everyones goal in sight (good free software with the freedom to do whatever we like to it) then our paths may cross at times but we'll work together for the greater good. My biggest worry for OSS is when it gets too big and it's flooded by people who think they can make money out of it instead of the love of good software as we have now.
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