Henne Vogelsang
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