>You find this surprising? I can't think of one succesful open project
that
>doesn't have a private list for core developers. IN fact, almost every
>project that I have worked with, has some sort of closed email list
where
>core/central developers can convirge out of site and with less noise.
>
>This gives the central developers a chance to speak uncluterred, to ppl
>that have a serious and technical interest in the matters at hand.
Is it closed or does the benevolent dictator or oligarchy or whatever it
is have an "oracle" of their own to consult? Raymond says we trust the
leader to make good decisions and if they don't they we will dump them
but the leader has to have some kind of resources for that.
It seems that as long as you're going to defer judgment to a leader that
leader is going to have his or her own trusted resouces and it's usually
going to be an inner circle of trusted developers, particularly as the
project grows to the point that one person can't keep track of it all.
I figure Linus doesn't know everything, he knows a bunch though and then
Alan probably knows 80 or 90% of everything (he seems to from the few
emails I've had with him, maybe even 95%) and then with the other "inner
circle" they manage to get it so as a group they know everything. When
you know everything you can finally make a rational decision.
I'm not sure what it means for a project to fail in the open source
world but I'm sure there have been projects that have been slowed or
hampered because either a) inner circle wasn't there or b) the wrong
people were in the inner circle.
This discussion should probably go on some other list.
Ian
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Aug 11 2000 - 17:46:41 EDT