On Monday 14 March 2005 18:04, Bruce Byfield wrote: > Christian Einfeldt wrote: > > If I can offer a suggestion for you, I would suggest that you > > do the same kind of systematic campaign for other issues. I > > really like you, Daniel, but you do lose my attention when you > > get hot under the collar. > > Christian:
snip... > > I suggest that an open source project in which someone who > volunteers as much as Daniel does has trouble being heard is a > project that is becoming dysfunctional. What's not clear to me yet is whether the issue is a personal conflict or a commit rights issue, etc. It might be that what needs to happen is for Daniel to be given commit rights, or something technical like that. I do agree with several things you have said, Bruce. One, Daniel needs to be given access. He is very trustworthy, highly motivated, and from what I can tell, quite skilled. So it might be that this whole debate boils down to Daniel getting more commit rights, or whatever the technical phrase is for being able to put your finger on the magic button that lets him do whatever he needs to do. > > Think about it: Daniel's a member of the Community Council, heads > up one project, and actively comments and contributes to several > others. Yet he has trouble getting things done. If someone like > that has trouble, what hope is there for anybody else to make a > contribution by volunteering? People with less determination than > Daniel will simply walk away. What is not clear to me is whether Daniel's ideas are not carrying the day based on their merits, or if there are some personal issues, etc. But I do agree that getting Daniel more technical access seems to have become an issue, and I personally favor Daniel getting better technical access to whatever equipment he needs to do his work. > > > OOo is becoming a huge project, one of the leading projects in > > the open source world. Our responsibility to the world is > > enormous. > > This is all the more reason to develop an atmosphere that > encourages more participation. +1 > What you call "boring," I'm > afraid, can also be called more centralized and bureaucratic. +1 However, sometimes debate is a good thing. There are literally millions of people using OOo. We need to balance those interests. At the same time, you make a very good point that someone with Daniel's skill, drive, and vision should get more access. > "The challenges of the muckrakers" is not being incorporated - > instead, they seem to being pushed aside. For that matter, even > the Community Council doesn't seem to be listened to. This point is the point that is not being made clear to me, personally. I personally don't know where Daniel is being stymied, but I agree that we want to encourage Daniel and others like him. One of our basic problems, too, is that OOo is not really all that interesting to the kinds of high level geeks as is Linux or Apache or PostgreSQL. Geeks tend to want to be interested in working on tools that they use, and AFAIK, most developers don't use office productivity suites. They use text editors or browsers. So we really don't have the developer participation that we need, and hence we are dependent on Sun Microsystems and our other corporate sponsors. I like Sun, but let's face it, they are constrained by their narrowly set duty to maximize shareholder revenue, and those interests are not always perceived by management as being consistent with our needs. IMHO, this brings us right back to Louis Suarez-Potts primary beef about too many people using OOo's code and not contributing back. Developers are in high demand, and there are lots of good open source projects. So in the meantime, we are left to having to work with Sun's more narrow corporate constraints. I am hoping that our small film might do a little bit toward increasing interest in our project, and IMHO we all need to bring in more newbies, so that our project might catch the attention of more developers and more companies and more governments. IMHO, we really need to grow beyond our parent, Sun, and of course there are issues with that. But IMHO we are doing ourselves a disservice if we don't recognize the very real material limitations we are facing. IMHO we should try to work around those limitations every day, but getting Daniel access is part of a bigger puzzle: balancing the passion of volunteers against our own lack of developers. The reason for the lack of developers is, itself, of course a very hot issue. There are those people who say that Sun doesn't really want contributions from outside, and that Sun holds outside developers at arm's length. I do know that I have heard buzz on the Net about folks in StarOffice sales in Sun who are honked off about having to "compete against" OOo. I have heard that OOo's code is bulky and difficult to manoever around in. So obviously, this is a very complex issue. > > I agree with you about the potential importance of OOo, but I > also think that the project is also at serious risk of sabotaging > itself in several ways. At a time when more people are needed, > exactly the sort that are needed are being pushed away, and some > wrong decisions are being made without them. I have heard this, too, although IMHO the word sabatoging might be an overstatement. But you are only one of many who are complaining about a lack of flexibility in project. To me, it all comes back, ultimately, to the fact that Sun is trying to compete with a very well-financed, very vicious opponent (Microsoft); that Sun has been criticized as not having a good plan to monetize Java or OOo or Sun; and that Sun's position WRT open source is seen by some industry watchers are being unclear and subject to wild swings. > > I don't say any of this lightly. I've spent a lot of time > teaching and writing about OOo, and it means a lot to me. > However, I also think that OOo is on the brink of trouble. And I > don't think that accepting that those in authority know best is > the answer. If you think that I am advocating "accepting that those in authority know best", I can understand your point. Merely accepting authority does not result in a robust open source project. I do not now advocating accepting authority, and if my past posts have led you and other to believe that I do advocate passively accepting authority, please let me restate my position: we need robust debate. We need to allow dissenters to have a place in decision-making circles. We need to allow them to have commit privileges, or whatever is appropriate at high levels of code contribution, etc. I also agree that OOo is too highly centralized, and that a decentralized approach would be better. The problem is that Sun does have vested property interests in controlling OOo and providing direction to the OOo code base, and that is our "cross to bear" as my Catholic mother would say. On the other hand, OOo gets the benefit of Sun's business acumen, capital, and engineer wisdom. So it's a matter of accepting the good with the bad, and trying to tip the balance more in our favor, and I don't know of any way to do that other than moving away from Sun a bit more, but how can we really do that, given Sun's property rights and Sun's beneficial involvement in OOo. I think that no one would argue convincingly that Sun is a net bad thing for OOo. In sum, I think that OOo just continues to need to mature as a community, and I don't have the wisdom to suggest how that would be accomplished, given the enormous size of our project.
