Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

That is not how open source works, you need to do 90% of the work upfront, people only join when you have something useful.

— Miguel de Icaza

When lots of people who clearly aren't complete idiots tell you something happens to them, it's probably best just to accept that it does, because arguing that you can't possibly see how it could possibly happen to them is only going to make you look churlish.

— Adam Williamson

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Quotes of the week

Posted Oct 4, 2012 20:52 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

getting something useful is not usually going to be 90% done.

The gap from 'something useful' to 'something has all the features that everyone wants' can be the work of thousands of programmers over decades

See the Linux Kernel as an extreme example.

But it is important for you to get to the 'something useful' stage ASAP. This includes people being able to build it themselves.

Quotes of the week

Posted Oct 8, 2012 7:21 UTC (Mon) by filipjoelsson (subscriber, #2622) [Link]

I think the "90% done" is related to the arcane maths that apply to programming projects. In my experience, when I'm 95% done - I have about half of the work left to do. So if I get help when I'm around the subjective 90% mark, I will still have the usability stuff left to do. Isn't that where you can't depend on one person's vision anymore?

Quotes of the week

Posted Oct 10, 2012 0:34 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]

Not only the usability stuff. In my experience, the amount of work I can foresee when starting a project is just a fraction of the real amount of work needed. Sometimes the unforeseeable work can take several times what I predicted. I would be tempted to say that the 80/20 rule fits almost right. That would make Miguel's 90% about 18% of the real work.