WARNING: Focused rant to follow.
To follow up on Rob's comments
the bottom line is that the leader will be basically the
guy willing to be the leader of the team right now.
No one really cares until he starts doing a bad job,
and even then the way to impeach him is to just
stop listening to him. He only has power because
we actually choose to listen to what he says.
If there is more than one person actually willing to
put in the effort and work required to be the leader
let them decide between themselves.
The ultimate proof is in the specific measurable
results, and we aren't producing many. We are
showing up more like the BSD crowd trying to
create a free product that we control rather than
the free for all that we claim. Quite frankly if
you aren't here to create a graphic, write some
code, or make some scripts, or maintain the web
site, then I would request you stop talking and
let the people doing the work keep doing the work.
This list has become very concerned about dissention
and disagreement among the programmers, or the
designers. I say let anyone willing to do the work,
actually do the work, and then let Darwin's theory
of survival of the fittest decide the path.
I am more concerned about losing people because
this list is too damn concerned with doing it "right"
that it never gets anything done. The power in Open
Source is that you just get lots of people doing it, and
one of them gets it right, but if you are suppressing
those lots of people from doing the work because of
your agenda that it be a certain way then you lose a
valuable resource willing to do work. Anybody can
show up here and tell us what we should be doing,
when someone shows up and says "here's what I did"
I listen to them totally differently and I can't even
include myself in the list of people who have done
anything other than increase the size of OODL archives.
If you haven't written code, enabled someone to write more
code, or developed documentation for written code, then
you have not moved the project forward.
We can talk about organization all we want, but the
bottom line is we don't have enough people to
be concerned with that right now. You start showing
me developers crawling out of the woodwork everyone
of them trying to "fork" the tree to do their own thing
and I will start taking this whole organization thing
seriously, but until I start seeing releases every other
hour, and bug reports flowing in faster than we can
read them, and thousands of lines of code going out
of control, I don't think we have anything to worry about.
I'm not saying we shouldn't organize ourselves, but
I am saying that if you require people to get an OpenCard
citizenship to work on this project, you will lose members
quickly.
To make an OpenCard project successful it requires
a few dedicated people who keeping modifying the code,
and telling people there's a new version.
_THAT'S ALL_
In this case we have graphics, sounds, and the UI product
so to speak. So we also can say that we need artists.
The only manager I say we need is the guy doing the web
updates and making the posts to the appropriate places.
We could use a guy (or team) writing documentation, but
other than that I am not interested in having managers,
which is where this list is headed. Given M. Uli Kusterer's
commitment to the group, I say we just declare M. Uli
Kusterer as our leader and then worry about the rest of it
when it comes up. So M. Uli Kusterer, assuming you accept,
I guess I need one of you to reply to the list and agree with
me on this, and then unless there are any objections, we have
our leader. If someone else wants to be leader, they just
have to demonstrate M. Uli Kusterer's level of commitment
and M. Uli Kusterer just needs to step down.
We spend way too much time worried about stepping
on people's toes or having it done "our" way that we
don't get anything done. As an example, if we were
doing it my way, we would have had twenty product
releases, a simple web site with as much description
as possible with some screenshots, the license would
be GPL with the additiional clause
"Standalone executables are explicitly declared to be
distributed under any license the author so chooses."
and be done with it.
But notice we haven't. Why, because I didn't cause that
to happen. I'm sure if I had gone ahead and did those
things, the group would now be in a very different place.
But I didn't do the work. Clearly we are all interested
in those kinds of results, so someone who is willing to
do the work is more valuable than the guy who has the
best theory on organizational models. When we have
so many people willing to do the work that the lack of
organization is now a problem, then the organizational
guy becomes valuable.
So personally I don't care what the structure looks like,
I just want to see some code, some annoucenments, a
screen shot, and some documentation. Of the above the
only thing I have seen is one release of code.
So M. Uli Kusterer, are you our team leader now?
-- Michael --
