Hi David,
First I appreciate you took the time to put your thoughts on the table. I'm not
sure an answer was waited, but here we go.
From: "David E Jones" <d...@me.com>
Jacques, I hate to say it, but perhaps the reason is you often don't review and
push back hard enough on contributions. This
results in a higher than desirable rate of problematic contributions making it
into the project, but certainly results in a more
personable and agreeable human interaction.
Of course, as I committed far more patches than every one else, I understand
you choose me to explain your position. I did that not
much because I enjoy personable and agreeable human interaction (which is
true), but because I saw that most of contributions were
neglicted. In some case, maybe there were good reasons. But I'm not even sure
of that, because there were any feedbacks in some Jira
issue which were very valuable and well done, especially in the deeper
framework parts. I believe that if a contributor makes the
effort to upload a patch and explain it, it's worth to at least look at it an
give an opinion. I also understand that if you have
not enough time to do it well, then it's better to wait or do nothing. I was
able to do that sometimes... Finally I must say that
some patches I committed were very valuable, some less, some should even not
have been committed (or not in the state they were). I
can agree with that.
Though I still believe it's good to get new ideas and especially fixing
patches, since you, and now Scott, stopped to review things,
you have certainly noticed that I commit less. To name a few, for a while now,
Andrew, Anil , Jacopo, and Vikas stopped to interact
as much with the community as they use to. Adam comes from time to time and is
always surprising, I hope he will continue. I feel
that it's not because they have less interest in it, but because they have less
time than before to do it. And maybe most of active
commiters are in the same situation: we earn a living from OFBiz and that takes
now much of our time, because our knowledge is more
used than it was 5 years ago. Another way to interact may be how Joe does: very
few but with high value. Unfortunately not all
contribution are crucial, should we neglict them?
I also believe that we (active commiters) are all a bit tired of the volunteer
efforts needed by a project like OFBiz. We all agree
it's now mature, and even if not perfect, in a good shape. A good indicator is
that a lot of users continue to use it with
confidence.
Scott's reason is a big part of why I gave up on reviewing and commenting, and
also a big part of why I gave up on doing certain
things in a community-driven way. In other words, early on in the life of OFBiz
I spent countless hours answering questions and
reviewing code in detail and offering feedback in order to help encourage
contributions and grow the community, while keeping the
quality level high. I now consider that to be, for the most part anyway, a big
waste of time.
Unfortunately I believe you are right, most of the time people come and go. The
time you invested in reviewing, fixing, explaining
is then lost. A volunteer project is not totally an investment, we tend to
forget that, because we believe on it (else what are we
doing here?)
I used to think it was easier to get someone else to do things than to do
things myself. For complicated things, I don't think so
any more. It's easier, more peaceful, more satisfying, and even more rewarding
to just do it myself. If others want to get
involved, they need to demonstrate a high level of competence and significant
added value, otherwise they are wasting both my time
and theirs (ie they should go do something they are good at and stop trying to
do something they are not good at; or if it is just
a problem of experience they should go acquire that experience (perhaps in an
open source project of their own, or at least
something that requires less expertise) and then contribute instead of
acquiring that experience as they contribute).
This is certainly true (for complicated things). And was actually how you
handled it before the Apache era. I understand it's hard
to do it another way, maybe we should have keep the same way it was done before
the Apache era. When it's only small changes (some
very important) it's possible to follow the flow, when a lot of changes are
committed a the same time it's above human capabilities.
Is that harsh and rude? Yep. Do I care any more? Nope. Those who call it harsh
or rude or unfair... they are the ones who need to
rise to the level of quality expected instead of asking me to compromise. I'm
done with that.
Yes maybe a more hierarchised organisation is better to reach some goals. This
needs to be verified... Goal is the important word
here...
So why spend countless hours reviewing things that start out in such a state of
poor quality? I'd rather spend my time doing
something of higher value and creating something of higher quality, and in the
process enjoy myself FAR more, and also have better
relationships with people, especially the people I enjoy having relationships
with.
For me, it's not a hard choice any more. Put some effort into your interactions
with me or don't expect me to put effort into my
interactions with you. I prefer to interact with others on my own terms, and I
hope others will do the same based on their terms.
This makes sense
In a voluntary world of free software this naturally leads to the more distributed or
"free market" community approach. That's my
dream now, and hopefully based on a better understanding of human nature than
my original ideas about a community model. The dream
is that each person works to produce the best they can, and we interact with
each other based on a respect each others work, and
the end result is the best work "bubbling to the top" as it were.
Yes hopefully this will (continue to) work, let's see...
Jacques
PS: you see I'm in vacation this week. And I can't find the energy that I put
in OFBiz before in such a situation before, something
has changed... Actually it's already a year and half this process began for
me...
<<No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not
the same man >> Heraclitus
-David
P.S. I apologize if this wording comes off as a little elitist, I've been
reading Atlas Shrugged over recent weeks.
Ha I just noticed your PS while writing mine. Indeed, we are not all equals oj
all terms. IIRW Spinoza wrote that laws are here to
protect the weaks when Nietzsche had anothere idea
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche#Morality (which is sadly not
well depicted in Wikipedia in English)
On May 2, 2011, at 3:43 PM, Jacques Le Roux wrote:
I don't see the things as dark, but yes sometimes there are problems
Jacques
Scott Gray wrote:
I've long since given up on reviewing any work, I would rarely get any support,
frequently get attacked and almost always come
out with no result.
Regards
Scott
On 3/05/2011, at 9:47 AM, Jacques Le Roux wrote:
Reviews, test and peers control should be sufficient, but yes it seems in some
cases it's not enough, especially when we don't
get a good consensus, and then gradually everybody let the things roll
Jacques
Scott Gray wrote:
I don't know much about Moqui, but the biggest motivator I have right now for
it is that it would remove control of the
framework from this community. I'd much rather use a framework that has one
good architect controlling everything than use
something where poorly thought out code can be dumped with impunity.
Regards
Scott
HotWax Media
http://www.hotwaxmedia.com
On 30/04/2011, at 8:54 AM, Adrian Crum wrote:
Since we're discussing framework rewrites and free markets and such, I decided
to throw my hat into the ring too.
One proposal so far is to replace the OFBiz framework with the Moqui project. I
have another idea - let's rewrite the
framework
using the existing community. Everyone can participate in the design - thereby
leveraging the immense wealth of knowledge
available in the community.
To kick things off, I created a document describing my vision of an application
framework. It's brief and it doesn't include
any implementation details. If there is any interest in this approach, then
everyone is free to add pages to the document and
we can go from there.
The document can be found here:
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBADMIN/Another+Framework+Vision
-Adrian
