Re: Essay RFC delayed.
Richard Stallman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > How do Open Source projects differ from the above? > In two very important ways. Firstly, OSPs have no > time-bound. That is, there is no deadline whereby > the next version of GNOME has to be delivered, "or > > I agree entirely with your argument, but the words raise a background > issue so important I have to make a correction. > > GNOME is part of the GNU Project, and we are part of the Free Software > movement, not the Open Source movement. We and they do similar > things, and we can work together in practice, but our philosophical > reasons are as different as could be. > > Could you kindly cite GNOME as an example of the Free Software > movement, not one of the Open Source movement? Please don't > spread the idea that the latter one includes all of us. > > See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html > for more explanation of the difference between the two movements. Richard, you should be careful what you wish for; you might get it. In your zeal to distance your doctrinal purity from the OSI's filthy but effective pragmatism, you are mainly succeeding in marginalizing both the FSF and yourself. If you keep this up, you're going to end up ranting to an audience of one, in the mirror. I would not view this as a happy outcome; you have given far too much to our community, and have far too much more to give in the future. Can't you learn to accept your victory and your allies more gracefully? -- http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr">Eric S. Raymond In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. -- Thomas Jefferson, 1814
Re: Essay RFC delayed.
Or alternatively, simply list another project so as not to confuse the issue midstream. As Richard points out, the FSF doesn't want the terms "Open Source" and "Free Software" lumped together. Rather than switching to a different terminology mid-stream, it would make more sense to simply select a non-FSF project there to avoid confusion to the reader. At 01:04 PM 8/18/99 -0600, Richard Stallman wrote: > How do Open Source projects differ from the above? > In two very important ways. Firstly, OSPs have no > time-bound. That is, there is no deadline whereby > the next version of GNOME has to be delivered, "or > >I agree entirely with your argument, but the words raise a background >issue so important I have to make a correction. > >GNOME is part of the GNU Project, and we are part of the Free Software >movement, not the Open Source movement. We and they do similar >things, and we can work together in practice, but our philosophical >reasons are as different as could be. > >Could you kindly cite GNOME as an example of the Free Software >movement, not one of the Open Source movement? Please don't >spread the idea that the latter one includes all of us. > >See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html >for more explanation of the difference between the two movements.
Re: Essay RFC delayed.
How do Open Source projects differ from the above? In two very important ways. Firstly, OSPs have no time-bound. That is, there is no deadline whereby the next version of GNOME has to be delivered, "or I agree entirely with your argument, but the words raise a background issue so important I have to make a correction. GNOME is part of the GNU Project, and we are part of the Free Software movement, not the Open Source movement. We and they do similar things, and we can work together in practice, but our philosophical reasons are as different as could be. Could you kindly cite GNOME as an example of the Free Software movement, not one of the Open Source movement? Please don't spread the idea that the latter one includes all of us. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html for more explanation of the difference between the two movements.
License certification question
I'm getting frustrated. I'm hoping someone here can help me out. On 7/16, I sent an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] about an Artistic License variant I wanted to get certified. That's where the OSI Certification Mark page said to send it. A week or so later, I discovered that the page had been changed, and now said I should send it to [EMAIL PROTECTED], so I re-sent it. When I returned from vacation at the beginning of August, I subscribed to this list to see if there was any discussion of it. I have yet to hear so much as a "got-your-message" acknowledgement from anyone at opensource.org. Is there something else I need to do to get the license reviewed? - Sam Samuel Reynolds [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Frontier Scripting: http://www.spinwardstars.com/frontier/ Reynolds Virtual Workshop: http://www.primenet.com/~reynol/
Re: RFC soon on essay "Does Free Software Production in a Bazaarobey the Law of Diminishing Returns?"
> There was a time that the GNU/Linux system was not of "sufficiently high > quality" to do much of anything useful. If that had been the deciding factor > we would have never made it to this point. Speak for yourself. I have been using GNU software and Linux since its very early ages to do useful work. 7 years so far of using free software. Miguel.
Re: Essay RFC delayed.
Hello all, again. >Jacques Chester wrote: > >> [...] Brook's Law [...] > >BTW, it's Brooks's law (not Brook's law or Brooks' law); the >current draft consistently gets this wrong. Bugger. I spotted this myself at one point, whereupon it was promptly forgotten. It's rude for me to do so, as the same rule of grammar applies to my name (Jacques/Jacques'). >> >Projects >> > >> >So what are projects, and what are their factors? Brooks >> >example can be characterised as a project with two factors, >> >being programmers and managers. If we hold managers constant, >> >and increase programmers, LODR tells us that productivity >> >will increase less each time another programmer is added. > >Actually, Brooks's law says that productivity will *decrease* >after a certain point, not just increase less. With the n**2 >communications costs, eventually you reach a point where >adding resources is bad not just relatively but absolutely. I no longer have Mythical Man-Month on me, so what follows may be wrong. But what you have described is the same as the LODR. After certain point, not only does the marginal output become negative, but the average total output noses over and begins to fall. Indeed, a better (and rarely-used) name for the LODR is "the Law of Increasing Costs". JC.
Re: RFC soon on essay "Does Free Software Production in a Bazaarobeythe Law of Diminishing Returns?"
Back to it!
Mark wrote:
>On Tue, 17 Aug 1999, Jacques Chester wrote:
>
>> The issue of quadratic paths of communications. It's one of the
>> suggested causes of Brook's Law.
>
>Mathematically, N^2-N is only the number of *two-ended* communication
>paths. I could see several situations in which what would matter
would be
>the number of possible *subsets* of the number of developers, which
would
>be a much scarier 2^N.
It gets hairy and fast. Hello, Chinese Whispers. But on
the other hand, network systems work better than
hierarchical systems in many situations. While they
are not as (apparently) transparent or (apparently)
efficient, they are inherently more effective. Think
market versus command economy, think open source
project versus command-system corporations, think
Bazaar versus Cathedral.
A general lesson that may be learned from Bazaar
projects is that the blurring of Enterprise and
Labour is healthy. Deferral to a Greater Vision is
still necessary, but so is everyone having a chance
to contribute themselves to it.
>One extremely important effect we're not considering is the
collaborative
>amplification of creativity: when people work on a project together
>instead of breaking it into pieces and taking one piece each, they
share
>ideas that would otherwise never be implemented. As someone else
who's
>name I don't remember said, "If I give you my idea and you give me
your
>idea, we each have two ideas, and together we have four." This could
turn
>out to be an even more significant contributor to bazaar-style
development
>than the scaleability issue.
Ahhh, now I am reminded of the corpses of the endless
Theory of Knowledge essays I have churned out.
An useful method of classifying laws is to divide them into
"Predictive" and "Descriptive" laws. In short, some laws are
more about How things will behave, some are more about Why
they behave as they do.
Consider Newtonian physics. It is largely "How". It allows
you to fairly accurately predict how an apple will fall
when it falls off of a tree. But as far *why* the apple
falls, it only goes as far as saying "because there is an
attractive force between the apple in the ground".
Enter relativity. Einstein created a set of theories that
gave a "Why" basis to Newton's how. As well as predictive
powers (how much energy in an atom? why, e = mc^2 of
course) it provided a description of spacetime which helped
to explain Why gravity happened.
The Law of Diminishing Returns is a How law. The causes
of the effect are really beyond the scope of this essay
and my own current course of study. Here is a summary of
possible reasons that have been generated *so far* for
free software alone:
* Pixie dust
* Lack of 'target date'
* The drive to produce good code
* Stallmanist ideology
* Creative idea flows
And so on. BTW, "Stallmanist" will be a legit '-ist' word
some day, I'm betting: remember, you saw it here first! :)
The point is that my scope does not cover "Why". If I
were to try and investigate "Whys" I could be at it
forever. Indeed, I *do* nod in the direction of "Whys",
but only in the summary of C&B which I provided.
BTW, ESR, C&B is all over the place. A great speech, but
it took a few readings to get what I wanted from it. Any
chance of a companion paper ("Faces of the Bazaar", say?)
in the future? C&B is to serious attempts at understanding
what the bible is to plain english: technically there
but it takes a few passes to get what is being said.
>> 'Always' is a dangerous word. 'So far' might be a safer bet
>> for now. So far the favoured solution is the Bazaar being a
>
>What I meant was that adding more people will never slow down
development.
Again - *never*?
>(My interesting observation about Brooks's Law was specifically that
for
>sufficiently high values of N, the developers will produce *nothing at
>all*.) The new people might turn out to be totally useless, but the
>additional cost per new person is so small that the free-rider problem
is
>negligible. If one out of a hundred people on the project's mailing
list
>actually contributes anything to the project, the mailing list is
doing
>its job.
That's an interesting point. It's hard to phrase, so I'll fiddle with
it for the Caveats section.
>The only cases in which this becomes a problem are those in which the
free
>riders actively interfere with development by, for example, starting
flame
>wars on the mailing list, spamming the newsgroup, wasting bandwidth on
the
>FTP site, etc. In that case, the core development group (once it
realizes
>it can't restore order) will typically adapt to the situation by
moving to
>a new mailing list, for example.
*never*, wasn't it?
>> Well, there you go. If I got ESR right, the labour-division
>> thing is handled by independent action and the parallel
>> handling of vertical problems.
>
>I didn't know ESR said that. I was thinking that in a group that's
not
>being forced (by a phalanx of whip-cracking PHBs) to build an enti
