On Sat, Dec 1, 2012 at 7:12 AM, Pat <pat.callah...@gmail.com> wrote:
> My thanks to everybody who's ever comitted anything without getting
> paid money for it.
>
> Thank you.
>
> For responding to my posts on the mailing lists.
> And for talking with me on irc.
> Thanks for Flightgear.
> It's a great hobby.
>
> I appreciate it and all of you.
>
Responding to earlier comments: There are most definitely leaders in any
open source project -- they are those that bust their tails to do all the
hard work. It is therefore not an exclusive club. But it is a club you
need to earn your way into. It is not a club of ideas (although ideas are
certainly valuable.) It's not a club of suggestions or wishes. Leadership
in an opensource project is a club of action and doing. It is not the same
sort of top down leadership you would find in business or politics.
Volunteers do not respond well to being told what do to and having
deadlines imposed on them. Open Source leadership is the sort of
leadership that you might find in a group of climbers trying to scale a
high peak. Words often do not need to be spoken. The leaders are the ones
who step forward and do the hard work and make the way easier for everyone
following. Open-source is also not a perfect world -- as soon as humans
get involved in just about any endeavor we have communication challenges,
differences of opinions, misunderstandings, and all that rolled on top of
our own personal shortcomings (and we all have a few.) So it's important
to remember that we are all volunteers doing this for the fun of it, for
the challenge of it, for the experience. We are a group, we all have
different skills and bring a different perspective, and contribute in
different ways. Roles can evolve over time as the project evolves, as
people's life situations evolve.
Centralizing versus decentralizing an organization's structures is a debate
that goes on in every organization -- there is a dilbert cartoon about
that. In an imperfect world we are always seeking to improve the
situation, but every change brings pluses and minus so what sounds good
might not always be as big of a win once you play out all the consequences
and side effects and bring equilibrium back to the system.
Curt.
--
Curtis Olson:
http://www.atiak.com - http://aem.umn.edu/~uav/
http://www.flightgear.org - http://gallinazo.flightgear.org
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