http://www.20thingsilearned.com/open-source/1
Cheers, --Ken Ritchie (Atlanta) ;-) On Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 8:13 AM, Oleksandr Nikitin <[email protected]>wrote: > ?Can't agree more with Thomas. > > For most of the programmers out there, the best way to 'get in touch' with > the project is to see the actual guts; > leave the shiny presentations for sponsors and marketing people ;-) > > For example, the OMeta release was hugely successful - I find more and more > applications of it, in completely > different projects from different areas of computing, while other parts of > FoNC remain only barely known, if at all, > to people outside of this mailing list. > > -- Oleksandr Nikitin > > -----Original Message----- From: Reuben Thomas > Sent: Friday, December 17, 2010 2:45 PM > To: Fundamentals of New Computing > Subject: [fonc] Show Us The Code! > > > I started reading with interest the October 2010 STEPS Progress > Report, then as soon as I got to the first screenshot, was overcome by > a familiar feeling of depression: I strongly suspected, and quickly > confirmed, that there was no code I could try. > > We've been over this ground in the past, and have seen two related > arguments for not following the dictum "release early, release often": > > 1. "It's not ready". > > 2. "We don't have time to support people trying to build non-production > code." > > To which the answers are, respectively: > > i. You don't understand "release early, release often". > > ii. You don't understand "release early, release often". > > Subscribers to this list do not, on the whole, care if code coming out > of VPRI is buggy, non-portable, pre-alpha, or will only run correctly > at a certain phase of the moon. We will quite happily help each other > build and play with it. We understand that you have better things to > do than support it, and also that in a few months time you may have > thrown it all away and started again. > > I, personally, often don't even try building such code; I just want to > know that other people can! > > You still seem to be stuck in the mentality of wanting to produce a > finished product. But in computing we all know there is no such thing. > Releasing unfinished, half-baked code will NOT turn people off. In > fact, the effect is exactly the opposite: a huge marketing WIN! > > If you still doubt me, just look at the number of questions about > building Ian Piumarta's idst repo, which has only seen one, trivial, > commit this year. > > Releasing a technical report on software without code is like > publishing a review of a new piece of music but not the score: it's > tantalizing, but essentially useless. By waiting until you think you > have something worth releasing, you are losing years—YEARS!—of free > marketing and buzz. And you need it! Competitors doing merely > evolutionarily cool stuff will consign your entire project to the > dustbin of history, if you don't get people excited about what you're > doing, and if we're lucky, someone else will pick up the ideas in a > few decades when they have dwindled to a mere stepwise advance, just > before they become actually redundant. > > The history of computing is littered with just such lost > opportunities; please don't become yet another. > > -- > http://rrt.sc3d.org > > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > [email protected] > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc > > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > [email protected] > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc >
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