I still can't help

[Stefan Rieken <StefanRieken@SoftHome.net>]

Hi,

I feel that not everybody did entirely agree on my last mail.

Has anybody of you ever taken notice of "the cathedral and the bazaar",
the now popular article about the power open source?

You say you get a lot of people who are willing to contribute, but don't
do a thing in practice. The reason is in my eyes is that they cannot
try. They all have limited spare time and are not sure if they can spend
it on you.

Imagine the following example: you make the complete sources of the
website available, with instructions on how it should be edited and
what's important. I then can grap this source, improve it, and if AND
ONLY IF I think that I have made real improvements, I offer you my
changed version. Any free software developer starts just by TRYING if he
can improve something, without having to make promises, right?

This way you avoid a lot of talking about nothing, but you will also get
the spontaneous improvements. The quality remains because you can simply
not use some "improvements" that you don't like.

Now all that my mail has resulted in is some discussion about ssc or
whatever and I still can't TRY if I can be of any help to you.

(If you already have such an infrastructure, please tell me.)

Greets,

Stefan