Proposal : aggregated dlang git repository

H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Tue Feb 10 09:16:54 PST 2015


On Tue, Feb 10, 2015 at 04:17:25PM +0000, Dicebot via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Tuesday, 10 February 2015 at 15:48:44 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> >Yeah, welcome to the open source community. People work on what they
> >*want* to work on, not what somebody else tells them they should work
> >on.  :-)
> >
> >The corollary is, if you want people to work on X, you should make X
> >attractive enough that people *want* to work on it. Inspiration tends
> >to work a lot better than command in a volunteer project.
> 
> I want to note that I am not totally against more controlled
> contributions - but that is totally different type of collaboration
> that implies much more formal process, as well as willingness to
> actually manage such team. There is a big mindset gap between "I did
> those things I needed and can share them" and "I am going to work on
> things you consider important", those are not interchangeable.

I've been with the open source community for about two decades, and my
observation is that the thriving ones tend to be the ones where people
contribute because they want to, rather than because they were told to.
Of course, that does not preclude leadership and direction -- in fact,
the most successful projects tend to have people in charge with strong
leadership skills, but said leadership tends to work best when they
inspire people to follow them, rather than laying down the law and
saying you must work on X, Y, Z, otherwise you're not helping The Cause.
The successful projects also tend to be those where contributions of any
kind are welcomed, no matter how trivial they may seem to be.

There *are* successful projects that don't follow this pattern, but
AFAICT they are quite rare.

Just my $0.02, FWIW.


T

-- 
People say I'm indecisive, but I'm not sure about that. -- YHL, CONLANG


More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list