Re: [gentoo-dev] Democracy: No silver bullet

[Andrew Cowie <andrew@operationaldynamics.com>]

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On Thu, 2006-08-24 at 22:36 -0700, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> As Weeve said, he's still trying to get people to stop breaking SPARC
> keywords, just like 3 years ago. It's just when trying to do anything
> larger than a single project that you run into issues.

As an aside, this has long been the fundamental structural problem in
the open source movement. Within a given project, things generally find
a way to get done, but when a problem lies between two projects (be they
peers, one dependant on the other, whatever) then things often remain
unresolved.

Examples:

      * Desktop integration between GNOME and KDE and graphics
        performance & capability improvement; freedesktop.org was the
        result of efforts to try and bridge / fill in these gaps.

      * Apache and PHP arguing over who was to blame for a certain
        incompatibility over Apache2 causing crashes. httpd people said
        it was PHP's fault; PHP said it was Apache's problem. And this a
        case where Rasmus is a lead committer on both projects!

This is actually the cutting edge area in the free software movement at
the moment - trying to find a common ground for not just projects but
constellations of projects and above them distros to collaborate. 

[This is what Mark Shuttleworth claims as his focus and it is the
titular role of launchpad to facilitate along these lines; remains to be
seen whether any other distros or large projects will actually start
using it. Viz also the mad activity in third-generation
distributed-version-control-system land]

AfC
Sydney


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Andrew Frederick Cowie
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