Re: Kickstarter was not successful... but it did help things...

[David Chisnall]

On 19 Dec 2013, at 21:17, Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller <hns@goldelico.com> wrote:

> So if not one person is standing up an saying "go there", we need some other
> means. E.g. a democratic one. Like an opinion poll and majority votes. Or we
> do a vote to empower a trustworthy person to define the overall directions for
> e.g. one year.

Leadership requires followers.  Gregory can put on his GNUstep Maintainer hat 
and say 'we should implement UIKit', but it has no effect unless someone 
actually does the work.  Implementing UIKit is more work than one person can do 
by themselves.

I can give you my perspective on the role of project leadership in the open 
source world as a member of the FreeBSD Core Team.  FreeBSD elects 9 people 
(from around 300 active contributors[1]) to nominally run the project.  We can 
set directions, but we can't actually make anyone go in that direction.  The 
closest we come to being able to do that is by working with the FreeBSD 
Foundation, which has a budget of around $500K - $1m per year) to fund 
individual projects that we think are of strategic importance.  Beyond that, 
the most important thing that we do is talk to companies that are interested in 
FreeBSD and ensure that they end up talking to the right people to get their 
jobs done.  The only real power we have is the final say on who is allowed to 
commit to our repository (and, as XFree86 showed, that power doesn't last very 
long if you abuse it).  

GNUstep is a much smaller project.  We had almost all of the active developers 
at Cambridge over the summer and we fitted in one of the smaller meeting rooms. 
 Getting a consensus on a good direction is easy.  Getting people with the time 
and motivation to implement it is much harder.  All of us work on GNUstep 
because we have some specific need, or as a hobby.  I maintain the runtime and 
the support in clang because I want a solid framework for experimenting with 
optimisation and cross-language interoperability research.  I work on Étoilé 
because I want to eventually have a desktop environment that doesn't suck, but 
that's further away from things I get paid to do.  

Various people work on Foundation because they use it in products or internal 
systems.  Very few people ship products using AppKit and so it tends to be a 
lot less well supported.  The only thing that the GNUstep leadership can do to 
improve this is try to find new active contributors (of either code or 
funding), and this requires finding either very large numbers of users or a 
smaller number of companies that want to build products or services on top of 
AppKit (or UIKit).  

Talk on a mailing list is cheap.  GNUstep is a community that is very open to 
accepting patches.  There are numerous examples over the last year or two of 
people getting entirely new projects started in the GNUstep repositories (e.g. 
CoreBase).  It just needs someone willing to do the work.  If you're 
volunteering, that's great.  If you're complaining that no one else is, then 
you're not contributing anything useful.

Open source projects are not created for users, they're created for 
contributors. Contributors may be ones who donate code, artwork, documentation, 
or money.  Hopefully they're also users.  Users are important only in as far as 
every user is a potential contributor.  If you want to set an agenda for ANY 
open source project, you need to contribute.  

David

[1] You have to have made one commit in the last year to be eligible to vote.