On Wed, 2011-02-02 at 10:43 -0600, Jason Grout wrote: > On 2/2/11 10:33 AM, rjf wrote: > > 1. What happens if you don't have a plan? > > > > 2. Who makes a plan? > > > > You have long experience with other open-source projects. Have they had > plans? (I'm really genuinely curious). Who made it? How > comprehensive/detailed was it? Was the plan a "success" (i.e., was it > worth making?) Was the plan followed? How did you give incentive to > follow the plan?
Axiom has a set of goals, made by me, such as http://axiom-developer.org/axiom-website/currentstate.html This gives a place to capture ideas and long term plans. A "plan" might imply a schedule and, as far as I'm aware, nobody knows how to schedule software development. This is especially true of free software. Is it a success? Well, a lot of the tasks have been accomplished, some have been abandoned, and some will take years to finish (e.g. making Axiom fully literate). How did I give incentive to follow the plan? Ideas that were discussed and agreed upon were added to the list of goals. Some of them have been completed (e.g. the boot language is gone), some of them have died (e.g. the CCL port is dead), and some of them caused much controversy (e.g. competing with MMA, autoconf, boot language) and were "decided" by me. Those who disagreed forked. A project cannot be all things to all people and someone has to decide what the long term goals are. But I don't think that a "plan" is useful except maybe in the short term among a group of developers. Open source does not really attract "groups" in my experience. It is usually a set of single-person efforts. Tim Daly -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
