Re: Senseless Bickering and Overpoliticization
On Monday 30 August 1999, at 23 h 59, the keyboard of Jason Gunthorpe
<jgg@ualberta.ca> wrote:
> Obviosly two people care. I would like to take a moment to point out to
> two formal resignations we've had this month. Both specificly cited the
> flamewars, glacial speed and increasing bureaucracy.
A little provocation: we don't have enough formal resignations from Debian.
Many maintainers no longer do anything useful (they often did in the past but
lost interest since, or no longer have enough time) but they refuse to admit
it and to resign gracefully. Think of all the important tasks which are not
done because there are people officially in place, but who do nothing (and
refuse to be replaced).
For packages, the workaround is to do NMUs. But for many tasks, there is no
possibility for the new maintainer to get involved.
> Each day I get to talk to alot of people inside and outside the project,
> and one of the biggest complaints I hear is: "It's not fun anymore".
>
> How long before there is nobody left?
And where will they go? Any project based on cooperation has this sort of trouble: this is hardly Debian-specific. I am/was in many non-profit/cooperation-based projects, both in technical and political fields and they always suffer from these problems.
If you get good ideas on how to limit these (I do not expect to suppress these), please try to implement them.
IMHO, it is still better than working in a corporation. Read Dilbert again to appreciate.
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