[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Jonathan Revusky wrote:
George Dinwiddie wrote:
<snip>
Scott Adams has made his fortune displaying the cynical view of managers
that you describe. Indeed, from the point of view of the technical
staff or others with limited access to those managers, it often looks
like decisions are being made very arbitrarily. In some cases, they
actually are. Incompetent managers are probably as common as
incompetent developers.
In reality, most managers do have a brain and use it. Most managers are
not merely trying to avoid drawing attention to themselves so they can
draw a salary for doing no work. Believe it or not, most managers take
their jobs seriously and make the best decisions they can given the
knowledge they have and the circumstances in which they make them. By
"knowledge they have" I don't mean technical ignorance. Sure, some are
quite ignorant technically and most do not have the detailed technical
knowledge of a developer, but they also have knowledge of non-technical
issues of which most developers are rather ignorant.
The question under discussion is whether managers who opt for Struts
have, typically, much notion of the process by which this software was
developed. Based on what experience I have of interacting with corporate
type people, my bet is that usually they don't. In some cases, maybe
they do, but that would be a comparative rarity.
That is why I don't easily believe that if Struts were to adopt a more open
approach to letting people commit code that it would affect corporate
adoption that much, simply because the corporate people, by and large,
do not know that much about how open source software really is developed.
You yourself seem to be operating under various misconceptions in this
regard. You have, from what I see, a misplaced confidence in the
procedures that allowed the current committers to actually become
committers. I get the feeling that you don't have a sense of just how
arbitrary the whole thing is.
Anyway, supposing for the sake of argument that what you believe is
true, then this leads to another basic question.
Would such a belief be well founded? (I mean the belief that it would
somehow become riskier to use Struts, say, if the barriers to
becoming a
committer were drastically lowered.)
Now we're leaving empiricism for speculation.
No, because the above propositions can, in principle, be put to an
empirical test.
The one thing that's clear is that technical progress on Struts ground
to a halt and they were superseded technically by Webwork, which was not
developed at ASF.
So, what is not speculative at all, is that the development process did
not have very good results. In order to be able to offer something
reasonably state of the art, the Struts community is basically
abandoning the Struts 1.x codebase and inviting the Webwork people in.
The Webwork 2.2 codebase then gets rechristened "Struts Action Framework
2". But what has happened is definitely a failure of the Struts people
to stay competitive technically.
Meanwhile, in my following of this discussion, it is clear that there
are people who were able and eager to pitch in and work on the code,
who, due to this process, were unable to. Obviously, it is completely
natural to wonder whether Struts 1.x development would not be in a
healthier state if it had been easier for new people to get involved.
This is actually the question that interests me. If people
believe this
but it's not true, then.... well... you know, should one
condition one's
behavior based on other people's misguided beliefs? Or
actually, in this
case, the misguided beliefs you are speculating that certain other
people may hold...
You've extrapolated several suppositions, here. Who says their beliefs
are misguided?
Reread it carefully, Geoge. I didn't say that they were definitely
misguided. I just said they might be. "If people believe this but it's
not true, should one condition one's behavior on people's misguided
beliefs?"
It was the first part of a conditional. You didn't quite grasp that, it
seems.
I presume from these statements that you're rather
young. In my youth, I tended to believe that those who didn't agree
with my beliefs were misguided. And I was not shy of telling them so.
When was your youth? I am in my early forties. Am I in my youth?
But even supposing that I am right and they are wrong (and I no longer
believe that these are boolean values), I am unlikely to convince them
by announcing that they're all wrong. They will naturally think, "On
the one hand, I have this kid without the experience to understand the
issues which I'm balancing telling me that I'm wrong.
Well, in this exact case, you're unlikely to convince them of anything.
These are people who simply don't listen. Could this possibly be lost on
you at this point, George? :-)
Really...
On the other
hand, my view of the world and the way it works has done pretty well for
me so far." Do you doubt everything you've learned when someone walks
up and says you're wrong?
If you do something and fail, you have to humbly accept advice from
people. If you want to be arrogant and not listen people, at least
succeed. The Struts 1.x development effort has not been a success.
I thought not.
Is your lack of success in convincing someone that they're wrong their
problem or yours? Do you want to do something about that lack of
success? Or do you like that status quo?
I have found, at certain points, that this conversation has been
interesting. As regards influencing the Struts people to change their
attitude, that is obviously a lost cause. As I disclosed earlier in the
message, I am actually no spring chicken.
If you like futile arguments, then you seem to be doing a fine job on
your own. But if you want to argue more effectively, then I can suggest
the AYE Conference (http://www.ayeconference.com/conference.html). And
if you can't find the time or money to attend, there's still lots of
good information in the blogs and articles of the people who put on that
conference--more than you could assimilate in a lifetime.
AYE -- Amplifying Your Effectiveness. Hey, is this EST by another name?
Or some kind of EST knock-off?
I take it you're into this AYE thing, eh?
Well, what I see is that there are people here (not just me)
seriously
questioning whether the so-called "Apache Way" is really all it's
cracked up to be. In response, you have people saying: "This
is how the
Apache Way works" or simply pointing to some document
somewhere in the
same way that a religious fundamentalist would quote scripture.
Do you want to contribute to Struts and feel excluded? Or are you
morally indignant based on higher principles? I can't figure this out.
Well, I guess I am somewhat morally indignant about some of this. To
understand my feelings about this, you have to understand that I believe
that open source really is about certain ideals. One idea that has
actually become clearer in my mind as a result of all this conversation
is this:
In an open source project, somebody who thinks he can pitch in and
contribute should have a chance to do so.
It has to do with stripping away all the bullshit prevalent elsewhere.
It's not which club you belong to, who your daddy is, whether your skin
color is the right tone. None of it. This is a world (or should be)
where your status is based on what you do. Period.
But this means that people have to have a chance to show what they can
do. I really believe that this is what it's about. That is why, yes,
this closed club stuff deeply offends me on some level.
In your last message, you questioned my maturity, I guess, speculating
that I must be quite young. To me it is odd that you mention me in
particular this way. I see vast immaturity here. I mean, I recently made
certain comments about the front Struts page and one of the Struts PMC
members, James Mitchell, came up with this barrage of sarcasm about
submitting a patch and all that.
I don't know how old that person is. In general, I have found that in
this dialogue, members of the Struts PMC do not behave like seasoned
adults. Obviously, if somebody gives you feedback on your work, you
thank them and consider it. (Or at least say you'll consider it...) That
somebody who doesn't even know that much about gracious human
interaction is on the so-called Project Management Committee gives one
an idea of just how much of a FUBAR this whole thing is.
As for the technology, and the rules of running the project, in both
cases I'm glad that the wide world provides more than one choice. I'm
glad that not all projects are run according to the same monoculture of
organization, so that people can try out new ideas, just as I'm glad
that the technological choices are varied. What a poor world this would
be if there were no choices.
Well, there is the problem that a high proportion of the people using
stuff like Struts don't have much say in the matter. It gets imposed on
them.
Regards,
Jonathan Revusky
--
lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/
FreeMarker group blog, http://freemarker.blogspot.com/
- George Dinwiddie
http://www.idiacomputing.com/
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