Re: Apple's Darwin commitment

On Wed, Sep 14, 2005 at 12:50:00PM +0200, Markus Hitter wrote:
> 
> On the other hand, I'm sure there are many more people like me who  
> mostly listen to what's going on. Occasionally they pop in, want some  
> task getting done, and go back to listen mode a few days or weeks later.
> 
> Other, similar sized projects, seem to get quite a benefit from these  
> people. They are very helpful to expose bugs, spread the word,  
> testing different environments. Often, they provide a test case or  
> even a patch and, surely you agree, discussing a patch is much easier  
> for the maintainers than to find, debug and fix the issue themselves.

I realize you have been around the darwin community for quite a while.
There aren't many of us who have.  The community has always been rather
small, with the number of active regulars on the Darwin lists being
somewhere on the order of 1-2 dozen people, and active contributors
being somewhere in the less than half-dozen range.  With a community
so small, when things happen they often happen quickly.  That has been
the case in the last few months, with substantial progress being made
on a daily basis.  There have been some bad times here, but I don't
think right now is one of them.  There is more activity and more people
actively contributing now than there has been in the 5 years I've
been involved with Darwin.  It is really quite impressive and fun.

There are still problems, I'm not saying Darwin has suddenly become
great and will have more users and developers than Linux by next week.
But things have improved substantially over where they were 2-3 years
ago (even improved over where they were last week!). 

> I tried to do my part by reading Darwin and a few other mailing lists  
> daily, give interested  people hints in the (hopefully) right  
> direction, tracking OpenDarwin's home page and occasionally trying  
> some piece of Darwin software. This isn't much, but better than  
> nothing(?).

That's great!  I encourage it.  Keep trying things and being involved.
I would like to suggest that if you have complaints, try to keep
them specific so they can actually be addressed.  I know it hasn't
always been the case, but there really are people working to fix
them right now.

Rob