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.
