On Wed, September 7, 2005 06:57, Finn Thain wrote: > Yes, in an ideal world, a lead would not have to exercise powers that > no-one else in the team posessed. But in reality, one doesn't elect leads > by drawing straws to pick a random unfortunate who will merely carry the > burden of extra responsibilities. So why elect a lead? > > In my opinion, the most effective (and innovative) open source projects > are run by an (inspired) dictator, and the least effective are run by > committee or by a loose group of random volunteers, each one with a > different "itch to scratch".
To stay close with our home, Apple wouldn't be whatever it is today, if it hadn't such a (almost notorious) key figure called Steve Jobs. Many, many, many people have declared that it is *impossible* to work with him, though the man has a vision, and makes that vision happen. So far, he has had luck and bad luck, where the luck outweights the last years. I completely agree that there wouldn't be a GNU (which is not Linux) if there wasn't an ultra arrogant Richard Stallman who even insults his own "user base", if they don't think like he wants to. Last FOSDEM, I met Gerv, the Bugzilla guy from Mozilla. He's a real *******, and I can say so, because he didn't hestitate to cut my question and put it in the corner as "useless". It simply didn't match his vision, and so it was crap. In the end, he *did* produce a fairly well bug tracking system, but don't you dare to suggest something he doesn't like, or your bug will disappear or get REJECT/WONTFIX etc. If you really want to change something in that thing, your one and only resort is the 'fork'. And I assume you all know what 'forks' have happened in the past an what it finally ends up with. I think there are plenty of (open source) projects to be identified that all got stuck after there was released some initial code (in the best case). Or just code that doesn't innovate and only gets bugfixed and in the end get overruled by a fork or redo. (See -dev on torsmo, which is such case.) -- [email protected] mailing list
