[Asterisk-Users] Re: [Asterisk-Dev] benevolent dictatorship, or inclusive developper community?

[asterisk at lists.styx.org]

On Wed, Jan 07, 2004 at 01:48:10PM +1100, Adam Hart wrote:
> can we stop this crosspost - I'm sure everyone who subscribes to *-dev,
> subscribes to *-users

Sure, it's all the same to me. Already the thread has forked to
one subthread on -dev and the other on -users.

> One idea, have certain people in charge of certain areas of asterisk. In
> this case, a cluely developer who knows chan_sip.c well becomes the
> maintainer of it, instead of relying on Mark for all bugs. Seems to work
> with chan_h323 atm. 

Yes, that would help.

> Don't question Mark's dedication to Asterisk but there's
> only 7 days in a week and Mark has many things to do (like developing
> digium's hardware)

Yes, that's the point. I wasn't seriously questioning Mark's dedication.
When all changes must pass through one person, that person becomes 
a bottleneck, regardless of how dedicated and talented they are.

In another communication, it was said to me that there's no problem with
doing things this way since that's the way Linus Torvalds manages the
linux kernel. But it is also the reason why there are a dozen forks of
the Linux kernel. There's Alan Cox's branch, each of the different 
distributions maintain their own kernels, some architectures (hppa for 
example) have their own forked kernels.

So, the Linux kernel community is fragmented into a dozen fiefdoms,
sometimes friendly to each other, sometimes warring. This, in my opinion,
is not a desireable way to do things; it is divisive.

The BSD community, apart from the famous fight between Theo de Raadt and
the NetBSD core group, has remained stable and hasn't suffered code forks
for a very long time. This is because the software development model and
decision making process is based on the consensus of a group of dedicated
people. It works very well and development progresses at a rapid pace,
(and, flames be directed to /dev/null, produces much cleaner code).

-w
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