On Sunday, January 06, 2013 17:28:57 Brad Roberts wrote: > Does anyone know of any mechanism for getting people to do what needs to be > done vs what they want to do that doesn't involve paying them? The only > long term successes I can point to all involve companies.
You'd have to look at major open source projects. They do sometimes come to together and agree on the direction that they should take (KDE and gnome would probably be good examples of that), and a lot of their efforts get focused on what gets decided, but I believe that it's still primarily a case of people working on what they want to work on. But I haven't examined the development processes of other open source projects in depth. If you have enough people, then the holes tend to get filled, but plenty of stuff still falls through the cracks, and unlike projects like KDE or gnome, I don't think that we have a need to create a direction for our project(s) and decide where they're going to be going. That might happen if we were talking about D3, but we're not (and I think that even the KDE and gnome guys only tend to do that when they're talking about where to go with their next major version). It's more of an issue of making sure that all of the little stuff that needs doing gets done. And if there's something that no one wants to work on or if everyone with the time and skill are working on other stuff that needs to be worked on, then some stuff just doesn't get done. And like you, I have no idea how to fix that. - Jonathan M Davis