Re: Coffee and Open Source

[mike808@users.sourceforge.net]

> Again, there's the problem of comparing physical devices to software. 
> It costs to make copies of physical objects, which explains how people
> can make decisions to not copy them for posterity.

I'm not talking about the cost to *copy*.
I'm talking about the cost to *create* in the first place.

> But this is fundamentally a movement about people doing what they see as
> important.  If something isn't maintained, then evidently few out there
> see it as important.

Not quite true. If Linus and everyone else stopped working today on the kernel,
it wouldn't stop people from making copies and using it. What people see
as important today is to get the free (as in beer) software. The vast
majority don't give a rip about how it got there in the first place.
Any more than you care about how much a company spent on R&D or M&A to
create non-free software.

> And if you see something important being left by the wayside, the best 
> thing to do is to help out.  A thousand points of light, and all that.

I agree. That's the idea the OS movement needs to do more selling of.
The process of actually contributing code (and documentation!) to various 
projects needs to be somehow more efficient than it is. It's definitely
a *long* way from where it was before the likes of SourceForge and Savanna,
Bugzilla, RT, CVS repositories, and all. 

And while OS has gotten easier to contribute, it's also getting difficult
to jettison cruft and obsolete code. Stroll through CPAN to see some.
It's easy to add, but hard to prune. Which is fine when we're starting up.
But as our garden matures, our pruning skillz need some help.

We need to work on making code management and maintenance also more
efficient and easy for the (drumroll - new buzzword alert) 
"casual contributor" to participate. Obviously, this is all "writ large"
and general, so YMMV.

Mike808/

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