Re: I still can't help

[Donovan Rebbechi <elflord@panix.com>]

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

Yes. At least myself and Jean have read it.

Now here's my question for you: have you ever been an active developer in
an open source project, and seen how the bazaar model works in practice ?
You've read the manifesto, but do you understand it ?

> You say you get a lot of people who are willing to contribute, but don't
> do a thing in practice. 

No, I don't say this. I say that a lot of people *say* they are willing to
contribute, but when you give them something to d, they don't do anything.

> The reason is in my eyes is that they cannot try. 

This is a load of nonsense. When someone comes on to the list, and says
"I'm interested in helping", we  don't hesitate to tell them what needs to
be done.

> They all have limited spare time and are not sure if they can spend
> it on you.

Bingo. People do have limited time, and they can't work on a volunteer
project full time. They have a job, and often, family. This is why a lot
of interested people are unable to do as much as they'd like to.
 
> 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. 

They are already available.

http://independence.seul.org/~donovan/indy.tar.gz

It's updated nightly by a cron job.

> 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. 

You already can do this. Look, it isn't very hard. 

(1)	Subscribe to the list. 
(2)	Ask: "where can I download the website"

If you're interested in the project, you've already done (1). I don't
think (2) is setting the bar reasonably high. 

However, I will post some instructions. However, I put it to you that
doing so will make very little difference.

> Any free software developer starts just by TRYING if he
> can improve something, without having to make promises, right?

Actually, one of the popular myths is that you declare a project open
source and millions of developers come from nowhere and start submitting
contributions.  The reality is that this only happens to very large
projects ( such as the linux kernel ). 

It's certainly true that with almost any open source project, everyone
contributing something substantial is subscribed to the project's mailing
list. 

> This way you avoid a lot of talking about nothing, 
> but you will also get
> the spontaneous improvements. 

Again, this is ( to some degree ) a myth. The truth is that 99% of the
work on most opensource projects is done by a very small core of
developers.

Seriously, do you have any experience managing open source projects, or
are you just blowing smoke ? If you don't have any such experience, can
you quit lecturing us about project management ? Thanks.

-- 
Donovan