On 1/6/2013 5:41 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> 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

Both KDE and Gnome have major distributions behind them which almost certainly 
provide a lot of the labor for the 'not
fun' parts.  Essentially _every_ popular package has the same.  They might be 
open source, but it's not the volunteers
that make them polished, for the most part.


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