Am 20.12.2013 um 12:28 schrieb David Chisnall: > On 19 Dec 2013, at 21:17, Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller <[email protected]> wrote: > >> So if not one person is standing up an saying "go there", we need some other >> means. E.g. a democratic one. Like an opinion poll and majority votes. Or we >> do a vote to empower a trustworthy person to define the overall directions >> for >> e.g. one year. > > Leadership requires followers. Gregory can put on his GNUstep Maintainer hat > and say 'we should implement UIKit',
I would suggest that he e.g. says (after discussion, opinion poll etc.): "it is very important to work on or finish UIKit next year" and that would give guidance to potential contributors who look around that their contributions are important. Currently, I think there is no such "direction" and therefore it needs people like Riccardo proposed. People who come, look around and immediately have an idea where there is a missing piece and then start to work on the missing link. > but it has no effect unless someone actually does the work. Implementing > UIKit is more work than one person can do by themselves. It is IMHO a hen and egg issue. We always complain that we have no developers, but can't tell potential developers where they could (not should or must) put their efforts in. GNUstep has a so high complexity for the new-comer that we must give some guidance of that type. > > I can give you my perspective on the role of project leadership in the open > source world as a member of the FreeBSD Core Team. FreeBSD elects 9 people > (from around 300 active contributors[1]) to nominally run the project. We > can set directions, but we can't actually make anyone go in that direction. But from your description I assume that the 9 people do set directions? > but we can't actually make anyone go in that direction. Yes, that is common for all community projects. But some are more successful and others not. > The closest we come to being able to do that is by working with the FreeBSD > Foundation, which has a budget of around $500K - $1m per year) to fund > individual projects that we think are of strategic importance. Beyond that, > the most important thing that we do is talk to companies that are interested > in FreeBSD and ensure that they end up talking to the right people to get > their jobs done. The only real power we have is the final say on who is > allowed to commit to our repository (and, as XFree86 showed, that power > doesn't last very long if you abuse it). > > GNUstep is a much smaller project. We had almost all of the active > developers at Cambridge over the summer and we fitted in one of the smaller > meeting rooms. Getting a consensus on a good direction is easy. Getting > people with the time and motivation to implement it is much harder. All of > us work on GNUstep because we have some specific need, or as a hobby. I > maintain the runtime and the support in clang because I want a solid > framework for experimenting with optimisation and cross-language > interoperability research. I work on Étoilé because I want to eventually > have a desktop environment that doesn't suck, but that's further away from > things I get paid to do. > > Various people work on Foundation because they use it in products or internal > systems. Very few people ship products using AppKit and so it tends to be a > lot less well supported. The only thing that the GNUstep leadership can do > to improve this is try to find new active contributors (of either code or > funding), and this requires finding either very large numbers of users or a > smaller number of companies that want to build products or services on top of > AppKit (or UIKit). > > Talk on a mailing list is cheap. GNUstep is a community that is very open to > accepting patches. There are numerous examples over the last year or two of > people getting entirely new projects started in the GNUstep repositories > (e.g. CoreBase). It just needs someone willing to do the work. If you're > volunteering, that's great. If you're complaining that no one else is, then > you're not contributing anything useful. > > Open source projects are not created for users, they're created for > contributors. Contributors may be ones who donate code, artwork, > documentation, or money. Hopefully they're also users. Users are important > only in as far as every user is a potential contributor. If you want to set > an agenda for ANY open source project, you need to contribute. I think the potential contributors are looking for an agenda set by the existing contributors. > > David > > [1] You have to have made one commit in the last year to be eligible to vote. > _______________________________________________ Discuss-gnustep mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
