[TriLUG] More data [Was: Palmer for another SC term; proposed amendment to the bylaws]

[Brandon Van Every]

On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 11:48 PM, Cristóbal Palmer <cmp at cmpalmer.org> wrote:
>
>
> PDF link:
> http://www.flosspols.org/deliverables/FLOSSPOLS-D16-Gender_Integrated_Report_of_Findings.pdf


The paper has many good critiques of open source culture.  I will chunk out
my responses to it, since the mail server is forcing stuff to be less than
9k.

I empathize with being marginalized for end user / fit and finish /
documentation concerns.  It's half of why I got kicked out of the CMake
community.  I irritated some core developers because I was filing bugs
against the documentation, and not contributing code fixes.  Even though I
could grunge around in the C++ in principle, frankly why should I?  They're
the experts with that codebase, they're fastest at fixing code.  I'm the
heavy duty English writing + CMake scripting guy, who's actually dog
fooding this stuff.  Testing why your dog food sucks, filing reports about
it, coming up with courses of action to rectify it, is real work that I
don't have to be doing with my free time.  I think it was valued to some
extent, but clearly less than code, and at least one developer got really
nasty about it.  The paper is pretty spot on about such culture, even
amongst developers who go halfway towards improving documentation and end
user experience.

>From that very bad experience several years back, I concluded I can (1) run
my own open source project and lead it the way I think is best, (2) forget
about open source and concentrate on my own proprietary development and
self-promotion, where my "fit and finish" mentality will be most rewarded,
or (3) be very careful about what open source projects I get involved with
in the future.

The Ogre 3d rendering engine is currently in a trial evaluation period ala
(3).  My main contribution to date has been cleaning up their wiki, shoving
all the dead third party projects to an "Inactive Projects" page.  I did it
to spare all the commercially minded people the pain of wading through all
that useless junk.  Secondarily, it better advertizes the open source
projects that actually have legs and a chance of survival in the real
world.  These contributions were explicitly valued from the outset, a fact
I found encouraging and a welcome surprise compared to the open source
average.  However, I did have some words with the main wiki admin at one
point.  I would describe them as "growing pains" we got past, not a
dealbreaker.  I can push them, they aren't fragile and won't just pick up
their toys and go home.  But I will be careful not to push them too far,
they do have a limit.  Personally I think "professionalism" in development
means that when engineers do inevitably break down and have a flame war
about something, they will get past it, work towards solutions, and
continue to produce real work instead of going home.  Ogre's been a decent
project in that respect so far.


Cheers,
Brandon