On Saturday 14 July 2007 18:48, Melchior FRANZ wrote: > * leee -- Saturday 14 July 2007: > > Perhaps FG has reached the point where it positively needs some > > sort of oversight management and planning, as seems to happen > > with many, if not most, large-scale Open-source projects > > e.g. Apache, Wine etc. > > I think that projects where this works always have a few sponsored > (paid) developers. Of course, you can tell those on what to work. > But you can't tell unpaid developers. What if some project manager > says "the next point on our plan is to beef up weather modeling" -- > do you think that Andy, Fred, Mathias, Maik, etc. will then all work > on weather stuff? Even though they have no interest in that region > (other than having it work nicely when they run fgfs themselves)? > I have insight in a few F/OSS projects, and everywhere it's the > developers who make their plans. Each on their own. Except paid > developers, where it's sometimes the sponsor. > > I for one don't really have a TODO list, though I often say I'd > put something there. :-) I decide on which things to work on next > as I run into them. Segfaults are often a motivation to look into > some code. Sometimes I need/want a feature and find that it doesn't > work as I think it should, and work on that. Today I just thought > that I'd like to do something "nice", something with Nasal and > placing models. (False alarm -- I haven't done anything. Well, not > for FlightGear that is. But it's not too late ... :-) > > m.
That's a good point about sponsored/paid developers. FG is the only F/OSS project I have actually had any form of active participation in so I don't know how many other F/OSS projects have sponsored/paid devs working for them and how that factor influences those projects. I am very aware too that I only worked on things that interested me - the 3d models & animations, FDM configs and control systems but not cockpits:) So _if_ undirected development contributes to chaos I was certainly playing my part as well:) I'm not sure to what extent this may be a problem, if it is a problem at all, and if it is, what the answer may be. However, I can't shake off the feeling and impression that FG is is displaying some of the early signs of a project 'going wrong'. Perhaps this is just because, as I said, I haven't worked on any other F/OSS projects and I am not familiar enough with the normal F/OSS development path but the 30 years experience (I was 50 last week, so happy birthday to me:) I've had of working on managed projects are leaving uneasy about FG. Anyway, having raised the issue, I hope it will be in the minds of the people working on FG and will, perhaps, extend the context that people see themselves working in. LeeE ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
