Re: Not enough Indians (Re: [e-smith-devinfo] Boss)

Charlie Brady wrote:

>On Thu, 11 Dec 2003 [email protected] wrote:
>
>  
>
>>>I disagree completely. Free software projects don't work that way. 
>>>      
>>>
>>On the contrary Charlie.  Show me a major GPL project that doesn't have some 
>>type of leadership in place.
>>    
>>
>
>My point was, and is, that such leadership comes from *doing*, not from 
>being annointed "the boss". And leadership, while eventually being 
>necessary, is not sufficient.
>  
>

Charlie is right on the money. You'd do well to listen to him. Right now 
you're headless chickens with good intentions and a lot of spin but very 
little focus, direction or awareness.

There have been some great postings but come Monday if someone exploits 
OpenSSL, or Apache you're high and dry.

Please start looking at credible plans. Put together a proper structure. 
I built a team of thirty at SmoothWall GPL. Sounds a lot but we had 3m+ 
users in christ how many languages so it wasnt a luxury.

So you have a patch maintainer and a project lead - thats two different 
rules. You also appoint a security person to watch vuln dev and cert 
postings. You appoint a beta team leader whose job it is to detract flak 
and questions from the patch maintainer and project lead and to organise 
FAQs and feature lists. He/She also looks after requests to join the 
PRIVATE beta list as sometimes you have to beta stuff privately or stuff 
breaks on a wildfire global scale and that makes support which confuses 
and detracts if not common issues to live and beta versions.

You then need a docs team to argue the cud over docbook/xml/html. Who 
gives a damn - it can by Latex or plain text - it doesnt matter. I would 
say that trying to produce docs anywhere as good as E-Smith will be a 
non starter. E-Smith ALWAYS had the best docs of any shipping GPL server 
platform hands down winners over everyone. You can bet that was a labour 
of love.

So... you have contribs... cool - its a start - but its no dice when it 
comes to project management. My friends and former VA colleagues Tim 
Perdue, Tony Guntharp et al (the designers of Sourceforge) have released 
GForge. Find a debian box, install it - use it. It is your backbone (or 
suggested backbone). It will organise you when all else fails and it 
will give substance to your dreams. Contribs is a cool sounding post run 
by cool people but look elsewhere for organisation and collaboration.

Right now you haven't posted anything credible that lends itself to a 
shaped team or force to be reckoned with. Together you can pull it 
forward but right now its still voices in the wilderness and you really 
need to get more organised.

Dick

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