totoro wrote: > On point one: well, sort of. I guess the issue here might not be > open-source, so much as the leaders of the project being able to > force/entice/whatever other contributors to do things they don't feel > like doing. This is a classic problem in all-volunteer open source > projects. Of course, you can have a way around this by simply having > more employees of SD working on the code, so that the > unglamorous/unpleasant/boring/miserable stuff is more likely to get > done.
Yes, the only way I've ever seen folks get motivated to doing the " unglamorous/unpleasant/boring/miserable stuff" is to pay them. And sometimes that isn't enough. Software developers are rarely motivated by money. They all want to do the cool stuff. > One is addressed above. Regardless of what the mythical > man month claims, you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater if > you try to claim that it never or almost never helps to add > developers. I didn't claim that. With tiny teams, sometimes adding developers helps. But it is never without cost, and adding people only works if the tasks are suitable for parallel development, and if the people are good. But the Mythical Man Month speaks the truth. Adding people to a late project makes it farther behind. > I've certainly been in situations in my career when getting a couple > bodies onto my projects when I was completely swamped was crucial, and > the only thing that enabled the projects to succeed. I've never seen a case where adding bodies helped. Adding talented and motivated folks, sure. There is a difference. But this is not comp.software.engineering so I'm not sure that this is a useful thread for me to comment on. As the wise man has said in many other threads: Patches welcome. -- Pat http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimserver/slimsoftware.html _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
