Comments on: Community-based production: do they need a roadmap? The Debian case

By: Roberto Galoppini

Roberto Galoppini — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 14:07:36 +0000

Thank you Martin, I didn’t read that paper before.

The way a corporate actor open the development process to others can deeply affect results. Looking at Eclipse vs Netbeans popularity I wonder at which extent it is to be related to the way IBM and Sun backed their respective projects.

By: Martin Michlmayr

Martin Michlmayr — Wed, 30 May 2007 11:47:43 +0000

There’s certainly a trend towards hybrid models, even though they are (or may be) associated with certain problems too. There’s a fairly good paper about the issue of control in the Netbeans community. The question there is who is actually in charge of the project - community or a company (Sun in this case).

Reference:

Jensen, Chris and Scacchi, Walt: Collaboration, Leadership, Control, and Conflict Negotiation in the Netbeans.org Community

By: Roberto Galoppini

Roberto Galoppini — Sun, 13 May 2007 16:06:44 +0000

Martin thank you to join the conversation. I agree with you, the absence of plans is not inherent with free software development.

You mentioned GNOME and other projects where paid developers are on duty for unsexy tasks. Do you believe that the hybrid production model might be the third way?

This way we might get the best of both world, but harmonizing contributions is not straightforward, though.

By: Martin Michlmayr

Martin Michlmayr — Thu, 10 May 2007 13:42:03 +0000

I believe roadmaps are gaining importance in free software development too. IMHO this is related to increased complexity found in many successful projects (both in terms of the size of the development community and the code base itself), which requires a higher degree of planning than in the past. For example, shortly after Debian 4.0 was released, the release managers contacted the maintainers of every large software package in Debian (e.g. the Linux kernel, KDE and GNOME) to obtain more information about the release plans of these projects. This information will be used to create a release plan for Debian. Furthermore, during the development cycle of Debian 4.0, release goals were defined in a much better way than this was done in the past. There was also a split into release blockers and release goals to make it clearer which work is absolutely needed before a release can be made.

In summary, I don’t believe the absence of plans is something inherent with free software development. I believe there will be more planning as more projects gain considerable complexity and size, and to some extent we can see that already.