Use the source Luke!

[Aaron Turner <aturner@linuxkb.org>]

I've been trying to think of ways to increase interest in the project as
well as speed up it's development.  It's been a long and hard road so far
and every now and then it's good to reflect on it and see what ya can
learn.

So I started to think about our development model and trying to figure out
how sucessful it's been up 'til now.  My honest rating is poor.  We've
been at various stages of planing, design, and coding for well over a year
now, and frankly I feel we should be a lot farther along.  Part of that is
Jason's insistance in doing things right... doing it right the first time
does take longer initially, but it should speed things up in the long
term.  But overall, I think this was the right thing to do.

I think when you look at our history, the biggest problem has been finding
enough people with the interest and time to do the work.  We've had a lot
of people come and go, many who cost us a lot of our time by asking
questions and needing accounts setup and the like, who never once
contribued even a line of code.  Of course there are exceptions to this.  
Marc for example has done a stellar job with htdig- I couldn't be happier.

People tend to come in all excited about working, then they quickly taper
off; often not even replying to emails I send to them, until finally they
reply "Sorry, I just don't have the time I thought I did."  or "Gee I'm
just not interested in that anymore."

So what can we do to change this pattern?  How can we weed out these
people before they suck up too much of our time?  

Seems to me the best way would be to open up CVS to the world anonymous
read-only and let people email us patches/code blocks which are then
reviewed by the core developers.  At this point, I don't think we really
have much too lose...  Even better it's easy to do.  Just make a few
changes for CVS and instant anonymous account access for anyone. It will
of course require that we start getting devel with more useful
information, so people can actually figure things out, and something will
have to be done about the Users table so people don't go around running
crack on our passwords, but that is pretty easy to fix.

We can also use it as a test.  Those people who are actually interested in
helping will be required to write some code.  Once they've proven
themselves, they will be offered a r/w account, shell access, etc.

Thoughts?

--
Aaron Turner, Core Developer       http://vodka.linuxkb.org/~aturner/
Linux Knowledge Base Organization  http://linuxkb.org/
Because world domination requires quality open documentation.
aka: aturner@vicinity.com, aturner@pobox.com, ion_beam_head@ashtech.net
The difference between `Unstable' and `Usable' is only two characters: NT