>On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 1:00 PM, Perry Greenfield <[email protected]> wrote: >> On Feb 15, 2012, at 3:01 PM, Matthew Brett wrote: >> >> [...] >> >> My 2 cents. >> >> [...]
I am both elated and concerned. Since it's obvious what there is to be elated about, this post has a "concerned" tone. But overall, I think this is a great move with some obvious problems to solve before it moves forward. I think the effort spent now looking for a solution will be much less than the pain of trying to undo a mess involving contracts and clients. That way lies court and code splits. So, let's do the hard work of figuring out governance now. In principle, I agree with Matt. We're moving from pretty altruistic code development to a model in which the most active development will be paid for and therefore controlled by influences outside the user community. This can have a lot of unintended side effects, including those Matt pointed out. We might also feel some level of discontent among developers who are not paid vs. those who are. This might make it hard to recruit developers who are not Continuum employees. There are tons of examples of financial interests creeping in and mucking up community computer projects. Symbolics vs. Lisp Machines, Inc. Early shenanigans on internet technical committees by engineers working at companies that were behind the curve on product development. Etc. As for being responsive to the community, Continuum is already promising the world whole new directions in numpy (see continuum.io). Were those plans even mentioned on a mailing list? Is that the direction we want to go in? Are there negative consequeces to those plans? What are the plans, exactly? Having those who do the work make the decisions only works when those working consider the needs of all. The community believes that's true largely when it's included in the discussion and not taken by surprise, as seems to have happened here. Of course, balancing all of this (and our security blanket) is the possibility of someone splitting the code if they don't like how Continuum runs things. Perry, you've done that yourself to this code's predecessor, so you know the risks. You did that in response to one constituency's moving the code in a direction you didn't like (or not moving it in one you did, I don't remember exactly), as in your example #2. So, while progress might be made when that happens, last time it hurt astronomers enough that you rolled your own and had to put several FTE on the problem. That split held back adoption of numpy both in the astronomy community and outside it, for like 5 years. Perhaps some governance would have saved you the effort and cost and the community the grief of the numarray split. Of course, lots of good eventually came from the split. I'd like to see at least some serious thought on how to protect the interests of the community under this very different development model. Trying it out and deciding we don't like it later will be a *much* harder thing to sort out. At the same time, the idea of multiplying the number of people actually working, and of having continuous builds and good issue tracking and all the rest, including the enhancements listed on Travis's web site, are very exciting! Let's just make sure we retain our community orientation with this new model. --jh-- _______________________________________________ NumPy-Discussion mailing list [email protected] http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
