Re: (FC-Devel) New input...

[Roger R Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

Majordomo rejected this because it came from an address not on
the list. But it seems to be a relevant message, so I'm
forwarding it here...

----- Forwarded message from owner-freecase-devel@seul.org -----

From: wolfejm@att.net
To: freecase-devel@seul.org
Subject: Re: (FC-Devel) New input...
Date: Tue, 08 Feb 2000 14:43:09 +0000

Wow!  I haven't seen this much activity in months, maybe
more.  I'd be careful about a big recruitment drive.
We've done that before.  One thing that I have learned
is that it's quite easy to generate a lot of interest
and get people to come to our site; this is a very
popular topic.  It's a totally different thing to get
all those people to generate system design documentation
and a working system.  I'm no different so please don't
think I'm casting blame.

I think we suffered the problems described in The
Cathedral and the Bazaar.  To paraphrase, Open Source
works great when you have something for people to code
against and not at all when all you have is an idea. No
flames please.

We all came here with lofty goals and ideas, but we are
also all very busy in our own private and professional
lives.  Every design decision has to be discussed and
debated for days/weeks at a time - often on topics only
a few understand.  All of that together makes it very
difficult for a distributed group to make design
decisions and produce a cohesive model together.

So where am I going with all this?  It might be best if
a couple people take a totalitarian approach and bang
out something that has some minimal buggy
functionality.  If there is a code base to work on and
the design is reasonable more people will actually be
able to contribute without devoting all of their free
time.

It would also help if people like me didn't ramble on so
long :)

Best regards,
Jeff Wolfe

----- End forwarded message -----