Simon,
Your take on things echoes precisely what I hear from many of our
clients. In addition, programmers working without design supervision are
a recipe for disaster. In my experience, the smartest programmers are
very 'hit and run'. They love to wrestle with a technical problem and
then move onto the next, with complete disregard for how their genius
solution fits in with the rest of a system. Sometimes I feel the dotcom
boom owed its demise to all those chickens coming home to roost, after
the excess of an era in which every VB script bunny marketed themselves
as a $80 per hour contractor.
There are millions of bright programmers out there: what we severely
lack (perhaps worldwide) is IT managers who have hands-on coding
experience. Programmers do not function efficiently when they are
managed by paper-pushing bureaucrats called 'middle-managers', yet
leaving them to their own creative devices is akin to letting children
play with razor blades.
Cynical? You bet. I spent years trying to make silk purses from sows'
ears, long after the manure-generating coders had gone back to packing
shelves at the local Safeway.
Andrew
Simon James wrote:
Open source projects that seem to flourish through community input seem to
be the ones that have widespread end user appeal that cuts across various
industries (Linux, Open Office, VLC, Joomla, FireFox, SANE, etc, etc).
While there are thousands of potential doctor end users of secure messaging
products in the health sector in Australia (millions world wide, though this
is still small compared to the above examples), I wonder how many capable
contributors there are currently in Australia (or internationally) to assist
with the ongoing development of Argus or any other health related open
source projects?
With falling IT grad numbers in Australia, I suspect it will get worse
before it gets better (if indeed it ever improves given the cheap Indian
labour force).
As you outline above, you are a full time doctor with your own side
projects, family commitments etc and it's completely understandable that you
would be unlikely to spare coding time. I suspect many on this list would be
in identical situations, but unlike you, I'd hazard a guess that only a few
could cut usable code despite their best intentions and interest in IT
(myself included). Is this a fair reflection of participants on this list?
So my question is, if ArgusConnect did everything you are suggesting RE
licensing, where will the programmers come from to take advantage of such
changes and assist in driving the product forward?
If the answer to the above question is "you're right, there isn't any
programmers ready to step up", then I think Ross Davey is correct in
directing his limited resources to growing his installed user base, even to
the detriment of those enthusiastic about the open source foundations of the
project.
--
Andrew N. Shrosbree B.Sc, B.Ec
Technical Director
ArgusConnect Pty Ltd
http://www.argusconnect.com.au
Mob: +61 (0)415 645 291
Skype: andrewshroz
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