RE: Open Source menu system

<from Tech List>

| -----Original Message-----
| [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Scott Klement
| Sent: Thursday, April 08, 2004 12:37 PM

| Hi Terry,

|
| Who's hands would it be in, then?   I'm confused.  All open-source
| projects either have someone who is "the authority", or they have a group
| of people who are "the authority."
|
| Someone has to decide which patches are keeping within the goal of the
| project, following the standards set out for the project, etc.  Usually in
| large open source projects there's a core team that decides what the goals
| and standards are, and that team appoints "committers" that have the
| authority to bring patches into the main body of source.
|
| A "committer" is trusted that he will make sure the code is following
| standards, works properly, and doesn't break anything before he adds it to
| the main body of the source.
|
| In some projects, like FreeBSD, committers are only allow to install
| patches into a "cutting-edge" version of the project.  The idea is that a
| large group of people (who don't mind occasional breakage or instability)
| get a chance to test a patch before it makes it to the "stable" version.
| The only way to bring a patch into the "stable" version is to test it in
| the "cutting-edge" version for awhile.
|
| As you can imagine, all of this requires administration.  Who would be the
| "the authority" who would administer all of these details on an SDA/SEU
| project, if not IBM?

You're also confused in this respect, Scott:  How is the substantially
different than the way ANY commercial software house works?  (Hint:  None...
None whatsoever, Scott, Terry, James and Hans!!!!)

| Basically, they want someone else to do all of the work of maintaining the
| software, and allow them to keep using it for free.   That's not the
| open-source model!

Your joking here, right?!?  This is EXACTLY the "Open" Source model!!  How
could you be unclear about this, Scott?


| Open source implies that people who use it will give back to the project
| in some way.  Either by coding, helping with administration, helping with
| distribution, providing support to others, donating equipment that can be
| used for testing/development, donating money that can be used for
| upgrading that equipment or operating system release, etc, etc.

And you've precisely identified the FAILURE of Open Source to deliver on the
myth.

Not that there isn't SOME-a this donating going on.  But if you've actually
studied the good and the bad of "Open" Source, then you've SURELY discovered
that finding people to do the grunt work of testing and documenting HAS NOT
WORKED OUT.

Now IMAGINE why that would be.

| Unless there is a large community of people who want to actually DO THE
| WORK of the open source project (as opposed to just wanting to USE it)
| it would be a disaster for IBM to release their products this way.

Exactly.  And do the grunt work as well as the glamourous
ego-stroking-pretend-I'm-a-systems-programmer-work, BOTH.