Jeremy Ruston wrote:
Great post, thanks Chris. Your perspective on BT and Osmosoft is very valuable.
At some point, Tiddly is going to live or die by whether or not the folks
most committed to it find a long-term model for supporting the software and
themselves.
I completely disagree with this, and I think it is the prevelance of
this attitude in this thread which has contributed to me becoming
angry and finding it hard to find a way into the thread that is
clear and focused.
The core of Mile's observation applies to both of us, though: we're
trying to secure a long term model for supporting ourselves while we
work on the software. I guess your point is that if either of us
failed to establish a viable model, then it shouldn't necessarily
imply the death of the software.
Perhaps, more to the point, my observation, across multiple open source
(and other projects), dating pretty far back (ARPANET era) is that
"communities" are very amorphous things that are not capable of very
much without a level of organization. In the early stage, that
organization most often comes from an individual or core group who
is/are most committed to the project (usually the founders), eventually
evolving into an established set of procedures, tools, roles, etc. that
allow the project to move forward without them.
Perhaps the best example of this is the Apache daemon - starting as a
funded R&D project at NCSA (the "NCSA Daemon") with a team of people
behind it, with funding behind them. After a while, two things happened:
- a user community had developed around Apache
- NCSA decided it was no longer "researchy" and decided to kill its
involvement
Those two events led to a lot of turmoil, that, after several
incarnations, led to the Apache Software Foundation as a long-term home,
and the ecosystem, infrastructure, and community that maintains ongoing
support and development. (This is, of course, a simplified version of
the history - a better telling, and one that might be educational in our
context, is at http://httpd.apache.org/ABOUT_APACHE.html)
There are lots more open source projects that have disappeared into
oblivion than have gone on to long-term viability. Survival seems to be
a mix of BOTH doing something useful to a large community, AND a small
leadership group that organizes the effort in a way that puts it on a
long-term, sustainable path. It probably doesn't matter if that group
is doing it for commercial reasons (e.g., building a company around a
core piece of open source code) or other reasons - though generally that
core group needs to find a way to support themselves and their efforts.
Whether it's a supportive employer (perhaps one who uses or otherwise
benefits from the software), or a business organized around the
software, both people and projects have real expenses - and it's a lot
easier to focus if one's "day job" aligns with the project.
Seems to me that, for Tiddly to move down that path, some core group
needs to provide the focus for a year or two - and Jerymy and Erik seem
like the obvious candidates.
Just one man's opinion, of course.
Miles Fidelman
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In<fnord> practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
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