Re: Open source : race or teamwork ?

[Evan Dudley <edudley@nacorp.com>]

How is this a feature of  the opensource model?  I see the
same thing happening in any closed/commercial entity.  This
seems to be more of poor management/collaboration.

I think many opensource projects do suffer from this because
it is maybe a race to join the hype and what not. In my
experience anyway.

In any project there should be a parcel'ing of the work load and
this should become as public as the code,so people don't duplicate
efforts. but, maybe I'm just blowing smoke.

Evan Dudley
edudley@nacorp.com



Bert Peers wrote:

> This is not really a game dev question, but there's lotsof
> open source developers here, so I thought I'd give this
> a shot.
>
> Recently I made a patch for some open source project;
> I'm not gonna give out the name of it because my intent is
> to ask a question, not write a hidden flame ;)  The patch
> was a moderate work to write (few nights of figuring out
> how the data flow worked, and then patch some).. in
> advance I was assured that nobody was doing the same
> or even considering it, so I took all the time in the world
> to make sure that the patch was very stable; the initial
> version had some troubles, so I didn't ship anything back
> for CVSing, just kept patching, testing, polishing, even
> asked some friends to help betatesting.  The surprise came
> when I finally decided I'd release my patch to the authors,
> and they said "thanks but no thanks, we did this in the
> meantime" :)
>
> That's actually the second time in a row I end up writing
> for some project, with the final contribution being nada,
> and not because of code quality.  Since time is scarce,
> my question then is, is this how open source projects
> generally work ?  Is it how they should work ?  Or was I
> just in bad luck ?  Is this kindof "tnx but no tnx" accidents
> (misunderstandings, basically), an unfortunate side effect
> of all open source projects, or is this in your opinion not
> really the right thing ?
>
> I repeat I don't want to hit back on the original authors;
> they're cool guys and I don't blame them.  But, I thought
> that open source worked like every author interested
> in contributing could ask for a piece of the pie, work on
> improving it in all peace and quietness, and ship the
> result back.  Speed of delivery is not important, stability
> is : you wouldn't want your contribution to introduce
> so much bugs that everybody else's work is nuked
> or heavily delayed.  However, my experiences so far
> suggest that OS development is more of a race : it's a
> jungle, you can contribute if you want, but don't expect
> anybody to wait for you to finish up; if someone else
> thinks he can do it faster, he will, even if he knows in
> advance how much time you already invested and/or
> near to completion you are.
>
> What do you people think ?  Do you prefer one of the
> two ?  Is teamwork feasible ?  Or is racing just the
> reality of it, and live with it or stay away ?
>
> I'd like to know so I know if open source development is
> still worth my time in the future.  Thanks..
>
> Bert
> not mad but slightly disappointed
> --
> -=<Short Controlled Bursts>=-