Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
-- Winston Churchill
Opensource is one big happy community, right? It's possibly the only implementation of a true democracy (since the Greeks) today.
My experience with this is on python-dev. (Yes, I realize we have a BDFL, but 80% of things don't need executive approval, so it's really a democracy after all.) We all get together find problems, talk, talk, talk, reason things out, come up with solutions, and... This is the part which can sometimes be a little annoying. Does it ever get resolved for good (committed). Many of the thousands of bug reports we have open have solutions which would probably work just fine. Why are they not checked in? My theory is that people are just to nervous of being to quick to go ahead. I certainly feel that. Threads will trail off with no definite conclusion, and it can be irksome.
Maybe, though, that's the way it should be. Python can hardly be considered bad or badly managed software. Things do happen and get done, so I guess I should complain too much. It's better than any other way we've tried. (Thanks, Winston!)
1 comments:
Threads can get resolved, but someone has to rein it in and make sure that a resolution is reached. As for the bugs and patches, there are only so many people somewhat interested in working on approving and applying patches that we cannot keep up with the rate that bug reports and patches come in. It's unfortunate, but until the dev process becomes easier I don't see it changing.
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