Stella Rouzi (differentreality) wrote:

On Tue, Jan 24, 2017 at 8:16 PM, Joshua D. Drake wrote:

...

Folks,

Just thought I would share:

http://blog.pgconf.us/2017/01/an-investment-in-future-why-pgconfus.html

Thanks for sharing :D

Indeed, and even more thanks for your decision! Recently the OpenStack community was in a similar position. I suggested they consider OSEM as a possible solution. Sadly (for me anyway) they decided to write something from scratch, which still has numerous issues, and it's not clear to me how they are going to attract a community of developers to the project from outside the OpenStack ecosystem. I see this pattern of wheel-reinvention and "competition vs. collaboration" time and time again, in so many areas of FL/OSS. You only have to look at the number of unmerged forks in any popular repository on github to see this phenomenon. Here's one of countless examples: https://github.com/sosedoff/capistrano-unicorn/network It's such a frustrating waste of effort; the various communities would all be so much stronger if they didn't fragment so much. Ah well. Human nature, I suppose. Sorry to let off steam - I guess I've had a blog post on this brewing for quite some time. </rant> -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-web+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-web+owner@opensuse.org

Henne Vogelsang wrote:

Hey,

On 25.01.2017 11:10, Adam Spiers wrote:

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Stella Rouzi (differentreality) wrote:

...

On Tue, Jan 24, 2017 at 8:16 PM, Joshua D. Drake wrote:

...

Just thought I would share:

http://blog.pgconf.us/2017/01/an-investment-in-future-why-pgconfus.html

Thanks for sharing :D

Indeed, and even more thanks for your decision!

Recently the OpenStack community was in a similar position. I suggested they consider OSEM as a possible solution. Sadly (for me anyway) they decided to write something from scratch

I see this pattern of wheel-reinvention and "competition vs. collaboration" time and time again, in so many areas of FL/OSS. [...] It's such a frustrating waste of effort [...]

I have a post in the pipeline too about this phenomenon, just from the other side of the coin. Maybe it helps you to get less frustrated with this :-)

I really like that I only (have to) collaborate with people that really want to collaborate with me, on the specifics of a project, with the used technology, in the style, fashion and tone of the community.

Me too!

Instead of people that collaborate with me for the sake of optimization of world-wide free software engineering resources. I think healthy collaboration (people loving to work together) is as important, if not more important, than resource optimization.

It makes this Free Software world continue despite my immediate technical need because I do a big percentage of my work just because I love the people I work with (👋 @Stella & @Chris ❤️❤️❤️), not because it makes sense :-)

I agree 100%! But the two sides should not be mutually exclusive. It is usually possible to have fun and enjoy collaborating with people remotely. True, this does require those running existing projects to be welcoming to newcomers and receptive to their ideas and requests for features, fixes etc. In my experience this is true in the majority of cases. Granted, there are occasionally situations where you want to collaborate on a project which has real technical merit, but you are blocked by unhelpful or unpleasant maintainers, and in those cases I would agree that the freedom to walk away is crucial. But so is the freedom to fork the project and run the fork in a more open and cooperative manner than the original, and the community has many prominent examples of this being a more productive route than starting again from scratch, of which LibreOffice vs OpenOffice is just one. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-web+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-web+owner@opensuse.org

Henne Vogelsang wrote:

Hey,

On 25.01.2017 16:04, Adam Spiers wrote:

...

Henne Vogelsang wrote:

...

On 25.01.2017 11:10, Adam Spiers wrote:

...

Stella Rouzi (differentreality) wrote:

...

On Tue, Jan 24, 2017 at 8:16 PM, Joshua D. Drake wrote:

...

Just thought I would share:

http://blog.pgconf.us/2017/01/an-investment-in-future-why-pgconfus.html

Thanks for sharing :D

Indeed, and even more thanks for your decision!

Recently the OpenStack community was in a similar position. I suggested they consider OSEM as a possible solution. Sadly (for me anyway) they decided to write something from scratch

I see this pattern of wheel-reinvention and "competition vs. collaboration" time and time again, in so many areas of FL/OSS. [...] It's such a frustrating waste of effort [...]

I have a post in the pipeline too about this phenomenon, just from the other side of the coin. Maybe it helps you to get less frustrated with this :-) [...] It makes this Free Software world continue despite my immediate technical need because I do a big percentage of my work just because I love the people I work with (👋 @Stella & @Chris ❤️❤️❤️), not because it makes sense :-)

I agree 100%! But the two sides should not be mutually exclusive.

Are they? I don't think so.

...

True, this does require those running existing projects to be welcoming to newcomers and receptive to their ideas and requests for features, fixes etc. In my experience this is true in the majority of cases.

But some people don't want to / can't cope with that. They don't really want to collaborate, it's a burden for them, they are not equipped for that, they don't tick like that.

True.

I would even argue that the amount of people who wont/can't collaborate is way higher than the amount of people who are open to this. It's just like that.

There's a *big* difference between "won't" and "can't", and that difference is exactly what I was referring to. A *lot* of people are perfectly able to collaborate, but they decide not to (probably more often subconsciously than consciously) due to what I would mercilessly label as the wrong kind of laziness.

And that means what you call 'waste of effort' I call people that we don't have to integrate into projects against their will/nature :-)

Of course I'm not in favour of forcing anyone to do anything - that would be completely nonsensical in this context (and in most others too) :-) But I think a lot of people end up avoiding collaboration almost by accident - through a lack of thought / awareness about this issue. There are so many times that I've spotted someone building a new tool or project which obviously duplicates something which is already out there, and when I ask them why they're doing that, it's usually because either - they didn't even remember to search for anything similar first before writing their own (and yes, I'm occasionally guilty of that too), or - they did search, had a very quick look at one or two existing solutions, and then decided to make their own anyway based on very dubious arguments, without investing any real effort in finding out whether it would be possible to adapt one of the existing solutions to their needs. Granted, there are also times where the wheel re-invention is justified on the grounds of doing it for fun and/or to learn a new skill. And of course that is *completely* valid. It's usually possible to distinguish those cases from the ones above by seeing how seriously the project is presented to the outside world. Although personally even if I'm doing something for fun, I still derive far more satisfaction from doing something original (i.e. creative in the conceptual sense) than simply rehashing something which has already been mostly solved - but hey, each to their own. I probably don't need to give more examples of this phenomenon, but here's a particularly good one: https://play.google.com/store/search?q=metronome&c=apps I mean, how many Android metronome apps does the world really need?! What the hell are these people thinking? I find it mind-boggling... -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-web+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-web+owner@opensuse.org