Linus' Lessons On Software Dev Management

Esther Schindler writes "In this interview with Steven Vaughan-Nichols, Linus Torvalds shares hard-won wisdom about managing software development projects, including encouraging community involvement, the importance of programming tools, and ensuring the project stays on track. For instance, regarding getting people to contribute to your project, he says, 'If you start off with some "kumba-ya feeling" where you think people from all the world are going to come together to make a better world by working together on your project, you probably won't be going very far.'"

Comments

Re:Kumba ya?

[mugurel]

Torvalds was always more pragmatic than Stallman. And Stallman is getting more out of touch with reality, not having programmed the last 20 years.

If you're trying to say Stallman is a weirdo, I agree, but there's no need to insult the good man.

Besides that, you don't know what you're talking about. His last commit (at the time of writing) to the emacs source repository was less than a month ago:

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/log/?qt=committer&q=stallman

Doing it yourself

[MonsterTrimble]

FTFA:

“The first thing is thinking that you can throw things out there and ask people to help,” when it comes to open-source software development, he says. “That's not how it works. You make it public, and then you assume that you'll have to do all the work, and ask people to come up with suggestions of what you should do, not what they should do. Maybe they'll start helping eventually, but you should start off with the assumption that you're going to be the one maintaining it and ready to do all the work.”

That is probably the most true statement I have ever read with regards to crowd-sourcing. You have to be willing to do it all yourself with input from others.