Re: On maintainers not responding to bugs
On Sat, 3 Mar 2007 10:45:47 -0500, Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu> said:
> The principle you stated obviously tends to be the case in volunteer
> organizations, true. It does not have to be the case of a paid
> employee, but yes, even if the maintainer team sets the general
> policy and gives direction to the employee, there will be a lot of
> hour-to-hour operational control which you will be ceding to the
> employee (unless you want to be one of those awful micro-managing
> managers --- but that's not a path to productivity, either for the
> manager or the managee! :-)
> I can't read your mind, of course, but it may be that the harder
> psychological hurdle is the one where a DD realizes that (say) 10
> hours a week of volunteer labor is no longer enough to be one of the
> primary contributors on a package team. That is a real issue, and
> perhaps maybe _the_ major issue.
Volunteers volunteer because of non-monetary rewards they gain
from contributing. And merely improved quality of packages does not
explain spending the time giving away ones labour for no mopnetary
remuneration when you could be working on paid basis to get the money
for eating out at a fancy restautrant or buying the new guitar.
Volunteers take part in activity that is fun, accomplishing
tasks that give one a feeling of accomplishment, and, to a large
extent, respect from their peers for the work they do.
If a paid employee does the lions share of the work, and thus
makes the decisions, garners (rightly) the kudos for the work done,
then the volunteer might have lost all the incentives they had to do
the activity in the first place.
In order to get the fun (decisions, design, crafting a well
made piece of work), and recognition, it is not unreasonable to
expect the volunteer to find other areas where they can still get the
rewards and satisfaction they sought in their volunteer work in the
first place.
So it seems to me that there would be a significant motion of
volunteers to paid employees. And then, or course, all the underlying
forces that govern a company with paid employees would be in play in
Debian.
Perhaps such a transition is what is best for .... someone, I
suppose. But I definitely do not look at these influences with
equanimity.
manoj
--
A good awakening have ever Gotama's disciples, whose recollection is
always established, day and night on the body. 299
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>
1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C
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