Re: GNUstep roadmap (was Re: [Suggestion] GNUstep-test for qualitycontrol)

[Jeff Teunissen]

Helge Hess wrote:

> On 23.10.2003, at 04:18, Alex Perez wrote:

[snip]

> > Project leaders need to lead. With all due respect, I respect your
> > years of service to the GNUstep community but feel that maybe we need
> > some new blood, if, as you put it, you really "don't much care which
> > way it goes." We need a leader. We need someone to give this project
> > some direction. You may have done that at some point before I was
> > around, and while you are a valuable contributor to the project, I
> > hereby question your ability to lead this project with that kind of
> > mentality.
> 
> Well, I do not in general disagree.
> 
> But you should think about the "leaders need to lead". It just doesn't
> work that way in community driven OpenSource projects. You can't assign
> work to someone, someone *takes* work himself. And if there is no one
> who wants to QA and upload BSD patches, well, then you don't get them.

It indeed *does* work that way in "community-driven" OSS/Free Software
projects.

In Free Software, a leader leads by forming a strategy and working towards
the completion of that strategy.

This requires that you be /able/ to say "This is where I want the project to
go", and it requires that you /visibly/ follow through with it, with
consistent progress toward your goals.

In short, you lead by example. Those who do not share the goals _at all_
will not want to go along with the direction (and may leave as a result of
that), but at least they know where they stand -- and where you stand. Those
who share /some/ of the goals will tend to focus on those in common, and
sometimes _their_ goals will coincide with those of the project, and Good
Things(tm) happen there.

Asking for opinions is good, but you do still need to be able to make a
decision.

> In any case I would suggest that if a new lead is *really* choosen, it
> should be someone who is a major committer in GS.

That is a given, as described above. The leader(s) of a project need to be
dominant in at least one of two ways: writing code, and as the public
face(s) of the project. The first is actually not critical, but the second
is. The leaders have to be very visible.

-- 
| Jeff Teunissen  -=-  Pres., Dusk To Dawn Computing  -=-  deek @ d2dc.net
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