"At the moment I simply don't have the time, but to be true to myself and you, probably even if I had, I'd be no longer willing to put up with Bullshit™ any more." Says Nicholaz one of the leading Second Life open source viewer developers. Read Nicholaz' blog here
I have read on this blog and others about people's complains about the recent hours long outages, viewer crashes, and several other technical concerns, and I strongly believed that LLs move to open source the viewer and later on the grids was a smart move in the right direction to remedy those problems. [have a look at "How Many Eyeballs Tame Complexity" from The Cathedral and the Bazaar]
However, a key component in open source development is the transparent communications between the core developers and the community around the project. Ignoring developers submission hardly qualifies as a good open source practice.
If examples were a teacher LL should have a look at how successful open source companies handle their communities. Like Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, Mozilla, IBM ... and the list goes on.
Finally, Linden Labs might have laid the ground for a successful bazaar mode project -A precondition for bazaar mode development- however, they should invest in the effort the community invests in them.
I am glad you mentioned Eric Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar". For anyone that has not read this classic text of digital culture I highly recommend it.
ReplyDeleteThis is an example of a pretty geeky programmer who not only knows his history but actually makes it!.
While discussing Gerald Weinberg's (who wrote the classic "The Psychology of Computer Programming") concept of`egoless programming''he quotes that "...Weinberg observed that in shops where developers are not territorial about their code, and encourage other people to look for bugs and potential improvements in it, improvement happens dramatically faster than elsewhere.
Raymond then talking about the anarchist's paradise we call the Internet quotes Weinberg quoting from the 19th-century Russian anarchist Pyotr Alexeyvich Kropotkin's Memoirs of a Revolutionist:
Having been brought up in a serf-owner's family, I entered active life, like all young men of my time, with a great deal of confidence in the necessity of commanding, ordering, scolding, punishing and the like. But when, at an early stage, I had to manage serious enterprises and to deal with [free] men, and when each mistake would lead at once to heavy consequences, I began to appreciate the difference between acting on the principle of command and discipline and acting on the principle of common understanding. The former works admirably in a military parade, but it is worth nothing where real life is concerned, and the aim can be achieved only through the severe effort of many converging wills.