Not just the trolls' fault

Not just the trolls' fault

Posted Oct 16, 2007 4:34 UTC (Tue) by einhverfr (guest, #44407)
In reply to: Not just the trolls' fault by forthy
Parent article: Yet another male perspective on women in free software

A lot o your complaints really are aimed at a dictator model or similar model, You can see
Linux kernel development as following an almost military structure (Linus as general, his
Liutenants, etc. all the way down to the common foot-coder).  Which is their choice.

LedgerSMB (my main project) took a very different approach, based in part on the PostgreSQL
community.  We have a core development team (6 members) which make decisions about
infrastructure, project direction, release milestones, etc.  THen there is a larger number of
people with commit access, and an even larger number of people who submit patches via
Sourceforge.  We are organized more like a Greek city-state than like an army.

Although most areas of the core team have taken lead roles in various areas, some specialize
more than others.  One guy does mostly db stuff.  Another guy has been a strong reference of
Perl language, another member is a lead on application security, and I am the lead on
accounting logic.  Interestingy, only a few people really heavily specialize in a small area
of the software and most people are involved in everything.  I will point out a few things
that should be obvious:

1)  Territorial theories (about men being more territorial) are misapplied.  Everyone will
defend his/her territory, but men and women do this differently.

2)  Everyone, men and women alike, want to feel like valued community members.  Gender doesn't
change that.

3)  different people have different talents and may want to contribute differently.

Anyway, I am looking heavily at questions of open source community management.  I may start to
put my findings together into a whitepaper of sorts.

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