Re: Betr.: Re: Rename strange/unexpected behavior.

On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 10:01 PM, Arthur Barrett <
arthur.barrett-qn/[email protected]> wrote:

>  Thanks for writing - sorry I didn't catch your name?
>

Sorry - my name's Alexander Yuan.


> I paid the wages/costs of CVSNT development staff for over 6 years at a
> cost to me personally of at least £350,000 (probably double that), and I do
> not own a home or other investments, I have no benevolent provider for my
> home or office rent electricity and phone, and my car is a 7 years old
> bottom of the range Volvo.   I gave copies of this software that we
> developed away under no obligation and it led to specific problems that the
> FSF advise a paywall solves.  What you are suggesting has already been
> tried and failed, and now I'm trying a new way.  This new way is
> already successful but maybe in another 6 years we'll need to replace it
> with something else.  Right now - all around me I see F/OSS projects
> introducing 'paywalls' and all people need to realise - if you don't pay for
> free software (as is the FSF's advice) then in the future you will not get
> free software, you will only get proprietary software.  There are real
> tangible benefits to using Free Software and it has nothing to do with
> price.
>
> There was a time when not charging for CVSNT was beneficial - but that time
> is long passed, the article I published at the time goes into much more
> detail - see the sections "Why is SCCM with zero-dollar price tag a good
> thing?" and "Why is SCCM with zero-dollar price tag a good thing?":
> http://www.evscm.org//modules/Downloads/
>
> CVSNT will be going for many many years in the future - continuing to lead
> the way in Free/Open Source Software Change and Configuration Management for
> commercial software development teams as we've always done.  Do you want to
> join the project today, or in 5 years time after wasting 5 years on tools
> that don't deliver tangible measurable benefits to commercial software
> devlopment teams?
>

>

I think there's been a miscommunication here.  My surprise was at the claim
that the community grew more active after Mach Hare instituted the pay wall
- but I don't see how this is sustainable, at least with the type of
community I am familiar with.  Let me make things a bit more rigorous with
what my mental model is.

I noted in your first e-mail that you disliked that users were requesting
resources from the community, but not contributing back through development
or support help or the such. In your FAQ, you say you feel that distributing
CVSNT gratis was harmful to the community because there were too many people
whose involvement were net losses to the community.  So we have users who
are consumers, users of the product that only consume resources from a
community.  And we have contributors, those in the community who are the
volunteers, donaters, enthusiasts that provide a net positive amount of
resources into the community.  In this model, the problem is that there are
too many consumers competing for too few community resources.  If I
understand correctly, you've decided to address the problem by raising the
bar enough such that only those who already are willing to be highly
invested will get community resources.  This essentially limits the consumer
pool to only those who are already willing to be contributors.

The FAQ mentions one positive effect of distributing your product gratis -
"reciprocity, generosity, and philanthropy".  My point is that communities
that revolve around free community-contributed code (or content, or support)
sustain themselves through precisely this effect.  The example of Wikipedia
was to illustrate how a community can be successfully built on that pillar.
 Some consumers eventually become contributors, who improve the quality of
the free product and bring in more consumers.  The community can grow.  If
the trajectory is right - that is, if enough contribution of content occurs
that eventually there are more contributors than there were - it becomes a
virtuous self-sustaining cycle.

Somehow, in this case, you seem to have encountered a terrible ratio of
contributors to consumers, or low contribution per contributor, or poor
signal-to-noise, or something of that nature.  But then the solution is not
to institute a pay wall, which drastically reduces the number of consumers -
they are the source of contributors, and removing them makes a sustainable
community impossible.  This seems particularly true in the case of CVS,
which already isn't getting as many new consumers compared to flashier
solutions like Hg and Git.

In essence: in this model of community-building, a pay wall can lead to too
few consumers, and the community will shrink for lack of contribution.  I
see how the barrier to entry can improve the quality of the community, but
not any way it can sustain its size.  Personally, I cannot think of any
other model of building open source software communities that is
sustainable.

I do notice that there are financial reasons for why you are charging for
distribution, but one would not expect the typical self-sustaining community
of volunteers and enthusiasts assisting you.

That should hopefully explain why people might not consider there to be much
of a CVSNT community.  It might also explain why people expect there to be
some sort of self-sustaining community existing outside of Mach Hare.


The only people complaining about the changes to the CVSNT project are those
> who are not willing to contribute which I'm happy to ignore, and Wikipedia
> likewise pays no attention to anyone unless they contribute.  It's all about
> contributing.  Wikipedia define contributing in a way that makes sense for
> them, and the free software foundation define contributing in a way that
> makes sense for Free Software, and March Hare define contributing in a way
> that makes sense for CVSNT.
>

>
To be precise here, I should note that Wikipedia contributors are (by
rule) supposed to write to the benefit of all readers and not just other
contributors - for example, English articles are generally written for an
international audience, even though almost all editors are from
English-speaking developed countries. But that is a bit of a tangent; my
point was that Wikipedia successfully offers itself for free to build an
audience, and uses its audience to build its community.

( Actually, in the case of Wikipedia, they may be overheating to the point
where they are burning through their contributors faster than there are new
Internet users from which they'd eventually get more contributors...but
that's a story for another place and time. =P )

Alex

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