Plenty of work ahead [LWN.net]

Plenty of work ahead

Posted Dec 2, 2007 17:04 UTC (Sun) by beoba (guest, #16942)
In reply to: Plenty of work ahead by muwlgr
Parent article: The first ATI r5xx/6xx X11 driver release

One of the primary tenets of open source is "release early, release often". Benefits include
more interest from potential developers and more bugfixes from early-adopter usage.

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Plenty of work ahead

Posted Dec 2, 2007 17:47 UTC (Sun) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link]

"" One of the primary tenets of open source is "release early, release often". ""

Just an inconsequential 'cliche'. Nothing surpasses experience and the *will* to do it, and or
to do it right and good, even if its not often nor earlier.

Plenty of work ahead

Posted Dec 2, 2007 18:45 UTC (Sun) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

you are correct that nothing replaces a will to work on a project, but the parent was
responding to the complaint that this wasn't a perfect driver yet, and I agree with him that
the principal of 'release early and release often' is appropriate. they have a driver that is
useable (but not finished) and they are releasing it so that people can find bugs in it and
tinker with it themselves.

Plenty of work ahead

Posted Dec 2, 2007 22:41 UTC (Sun) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link]

Absolutely correct... but it doesn't invalidate that we can get 3 or 4 projects doing the same
thing *early and often*, none gets to be *god enough* because of the waiting for input and the
lack of "will" for concentrated efforts... to the point that 3 different experiences gets to 3
different code repositorys with little chance of code intermingling... being the funny or
tragic fact that one is better at some features than the others, and vice versa, and the sum
of the three should had made a considerable better product while people are stucked with
buying $300 pieces for only using $100.

Plenty of work ahead

Posted Dec 3, 2007 0:52 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

but if they all wait until they are 'finished' to release anything the result is none of them
every show up, there's no chance for them to pickup features from each other, and no chance
for new developers to build off of what's been done instead of starting from scratch.

I agree that there needs to be a will to keep working, but in this case there's no indication
of any lack of will, so it seems like you are spouting discouragement when what needs to
happen in to encourage them to keep going (by pure praise, bug reports, beta testing, or
coding), not fussing that the driver they released doesn't have all the features yet.