View on project leadership and failures....

[Gerald (Jerry) Carter]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

John L. Utz III wrote:

>> I dont really think that you guys have too much to 
>> learn from this. If you did, you would have been
>> dust 5 years ago.

I think that Samba has always struggled with getting
more people involved.  I also think that there are
several things that struck a chord in the letter.
I'm sure there are more things going on in NetBSD that
what is presented in that letter,

> We could probably point out several things of which 
> we (Samba) as a project have been guilty of.  I could
> probably pin several to myself as a developer as well.
> 
>> Well, probably the most salient one is that when changes 
>> come in you just jerry-ize it to your satisfaction. That
>> doesnt enhance the contributors' sense of ownership.

True.  I'll admit it. I learned that from Jeremy btw... :-)
but the fact is that very little code that comes in
from external sources takes everything into account.
If anything our major fault is fixing things when we
should push back and and say "fix this and that....
then we'll accept it into the tree".  And I think this goes
back to (a) not wanting to risk loosing a needed feature,
and (b) checking in incomplete things ourselves.

I'm not suggesting that we should change out work
flow (yet).  I'm only pointing that that we apply the
same things to others that we apply to ourselves.

>> However, the *pragmatic* reason for that choice is 
>> that samba can not afford to be broken. period. it's
>> not a geek toy. it get's used by people who couldnt
>> care less about open source, they just want to get 
>> their work done on the platform that they want to run.

You could say the same thing about the Linux kernel
and Apache. I don't Sambe is any different in this
respect that any other widely used software project.

If we were better about letting people know what we
required of code, we would probably get better submitted
code.

>> So from an end user tactical perspective, i 
>> dont fault your decisionmaking.  Strategically?
>> not so sure.....

Still thinking....



cheers, jerry
=====================================================================
Samba                                    ------- http://www.samba.org
Centeris                         -----------  http://www.centeris.com
"What man is a man who does not make the world better?"      --Balian
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.4 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFE9y7OIR7qMdg1EfYRAl6UAKDnFEZFjSNpo1kzHLNKi+QSA169agCeJMgO
uWkEKyBSrnvuliUywttnrVU=
=rKd2
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----