Community vs developers

Posted Feb 9, 2006 0:19 UTC (Thu) by cventers (subscriber, #31465) [Link]

I agree totally with your sentiment, but disagree with the mechanism.
There's no reason to have "read-only" mailing lists. What you need is a
strong community like LKML where badness is immediately and brutally
gunned down.

Be one hundred thousand percent blunt about every real point you make.
Don't beat around the bush. Don't whine, and then the people who choose
to whine will stand out from the crowd.

Often, LKML 'protocol violations' if you will only have to be dismissed
by one or two people. The rest of the developers just ignore it. This
comes from having a strong sense of "this is the way we do development".
If that's your attitude, who can argue?

What I was getting at elsewhere in the thread about Novell and XGL is
simply this. It's fine to ask questions and get upset when open source
development goes closed.

But you do that personally. When you're wearing your Linux dev hat, or
your GNOME dev hat, your approach to the problem is simply "I am
uninterested in development that doesn't take place at our pace. I am
grateful if they decide to come submit patches / join up, but if they do
that, they'll need to understand that there will need to be allowances
made for the way we do things around here."

So, in closing, have STRONG personalities like Torvalds. If a whiner
enters your list with some idea that is outright wrong, don't entertain
it for very long. The number one attitude to remember is "SHOW ME THE
CODE." Then your community won't be hostile to fast-paced development.