Re: Need Leadership

[Anders Feder <lists anders feder dk>]

lør, 21 06 2008 kl. 11:33 -0700, skrev Luis Villa: 
> +1. This is not a gigantic company- you don't have to persuade the
> management to get permission to innovate. You have the code, and
> potentially you have the idea. So JFDI. If it is worthwhile, more
> people will come.

That's a cool acronym, but hasn't that been the standing procedure
since, well, ever? Sure, it has produced a desktop environment beyond
anything I could personally conceive, but is that a particularly
interesting metric? I think most end-users could care less about the
flamewars on this and other lists.

Let's look instead at how likely GNOME is too sustain innovative
development. Hypothetically speaking, if I have a brilliant idea which
require cooperation from the maintainers of module X, Y and Z, how
likely is it that I will keep trying to JFDI if all said maintainers
refuse to cooperate and tell me to JFDI, citing a desire to work on
_their_ respective brilliant ideas? How likely is it that I will stick
around in the GNOME ecosystem rather than migrate to, oh say, Windows
where the development community and the potential for collaboration is
much much larger and I even have a decent chance of being paid for my
work?

I think you can count on most innovative folks being at least as
disinterested in being told to JFDI! as you are in working on their
ideas or listening to their visions - personally I don't see how this
fight-club attitude is more likely to save GNOME than a degree of formal
leadership or communication about interoperability.

-- 
Anders Feder <lists anders feder dk>