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OpenOffice in a nut-shell ...OpenOffice in a nut-shell ...Posted Jan 18, 2010 16:19 UTC (Mon) by mmeeks (subscriber, #56090)Parent article: LCA: How to destroy your community
Wow, this is pure gold. Though, I think rather restrained - this only scratches the surface of a really rich seam of dysfunction, much of it popularized by Sun Microsystems - though: to be fair that is perhaps a function of their early strategic move into Free software - and other big-corporations will no doubt follow at speed.
eg. step 6 - misses the neat consideration of having someone with no technical skills whatsoever as the "community liason". This neatly ensures that step 7. is a given, the documentation they write for step 3. will be hopelessly inadequate, and they will almost certainly build a community of like-minded people, ie. the totally non-technical: a hat-trick of achievement.
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OpenOffice in a nut-shell ... Posted Jan 18, 2010 19:43 UTC (Mon) by AlexHudson (subscriber, #41828) [Link]
As far as Sun's innovation goes, I feel it is somewhat overshadowed by the rapid progress made by others.
SugarCRM managed to achieve #1, #4, #5, #7 and #9 simultaneously by requiring The Outsiders to submit their patches via a small web form. Somewhat surprisingly, this form once went broken for months without anyone actually noticing - it's unclear to me if any code submitted that way ever made it into the codebase either.
OpenOffice in a nut-shell ... Posted Jan 18, 2010 22:07 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
That's... truly remarkable. Why has no other project emulated this
stunning decision, I wonder?
(in a past job, I worked on a proprietary system that had a homebrewed
OpenOffice in a nut-shell ... Posted Jan 19, 2010 17:21 UTC (Tue) by AlexHudson (subscriber, #41828) [Link] Hehe, look : still it lives! I don't know if it has changed at all, but the process appears to be improved further from my original understanding. You first create a bug entry covering the issue (sane, aside from login required), then you submit the web form to alert them to the submission (er...?) and they have a lovely set of guidelines to follow (gems like "The proposed change must support all baseline-certified versions of PHP, and must be able to support all databases, etc."). Beat them hoops. Also, by my reading, they want the description of the improvement in the bug tracker, but the actual code submission via the web - what?
OpenOffice in a nut-shell ... Posted Jan 19, 2010 21:15 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Stunning. Nothing screams 'we don't expect contributions, go away' like
constraints like that. The 'no 3rd-party software' rule alone is an excellent way of forcing wheel-reinvention for no good reason whatever.
OpenOffice in a nut-shell ... Posted Jan 18, 2010 20:33 UTC (Mon) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link] The funny thing is, Josh has held this talk while still at Sun and I think it may have been well received even by Sunnies listening to it.
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