Date: Tue, 04 Apr 1995 23:58:29 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@freefall.cdrom.com> To: rkw@dataplex.net (Richard Wackerbarth) Cc: current@FreeBSD.org, rgrimes@gndrsh.aac.dev.com, nate@trout.sri.mt.net Subject: Re: NOTICE: If you care, speak now! Message-ID: <6663.797065109@freefall.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 05 Apr 95 00:22:03 CDT." <v02120b17aba7c9f340f2@[199.183.109.242]>
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> I have no problem with your reluctance to "accept" something "sight unseen". > I do have a problem with trying to do something with virtually no feedback > from the intended "users". If you will read my proposals, I am asking for > an agreement that the group will support a change toward the goals that I > have stated. If that is achieved, I then ask for acceptance of a specific > methodology. I would expect the actual changes to be accepted only after > others have adequately reviewed the work. Hmmmmm. I begin to see the problem. I'll put it as directly as I can: We don't work that way. That's not to say that we don't work that way in other situations, or that some of us wouldn't be perfectly happy to see a FreeBSD organization so complete and dedicated to that kind of focused "discuss-design-discuss-develop" R&D strategy that such things were possible. But many months of learning, often the hard way, that free software development moves my somewhat different rules has made us wary. So many people have yelled "fire!" in the crowded theatre that nobody wants to really leave their seats until they're SURE there's a fire. There's also the small problem of TIME. There is never enough of it, and even sending email in these kinds of exchanges takes up oh so much of it! We're not all blessed with the kind of surplus time required to truly go through the full process you describe, no matter how much sense it might make. You can forget it! Nobody is going to agree unanimously, nobody is going to agree to put much time into it when they've already got massively full plates, nobody is even going to WANT to read long missives about boring makefile variables and obscure architectural decisions. I may pretend an occasional interest myself, but it will be a transparent sham that fools no one - I will be clearly busy working on OTHER things. So what's a poor boy to do, you ask? Just Do It, as they say in the Addidas commercials. Go off and do what you think is right then present it for inspection, fully (or close to fully) working and let its users decide to champion it or not. If you've truly done good stuff, then everyone will drown out the detractors FOR YOU in their hoots of admiration and delight and your changes will make it into the tree, complete with marching bad and occasional messages saying "Cool!" plopping into your mailbox. Try and hash it out in painful and contentious detail first and you'll only scuttle your project before getting it out of the dock. People influence by DOING around here, not by talking. And so on that note, I'll shut up and actually try to do some bl**dy WORK done this week! It's been an Email Picnic In Hell!! :-) Jordan
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