Wednesday May 14, 2008 links for 2008-05-14
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Cory's new book has hit Amazon UK. Time to grab a copy.
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I've previously found that hearing poems read by their author adds a new dimension to their meaning. Hearing TS Eliot read The Waste and was transformative. So I'm looking forward to this arriving.
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While I think this correctly diagnoses the problem I think the solution is to be found elsewhere than trying to make a developer community hire a PHB.
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Truly excellent. The lesson to be learned is that the best way to get Java everywhere was to work with the community rather than expect the community to work with Sun. Let's hope that lesson sticks and spreads.
Posted by webmink
( May 14 2008, 01:33:51 AM PDT )
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Wrt. Big Brother, I think I might hang on for the UK ed. in November - which should have extra stuff incl. Bruce Schnier afterword I seem to remember hearing about on Cory's podcast. Read all his other stuff so far, love it.
Posted by Tim Foster on May 15, 2008 at 01:35 AM PDT #
I think we've all seen commercial products that leave us scratching our heads about "why on earth did they do that???!!!" -- it's hardly restricted to FOSS. Having a product marketing manager doesn't solve that problem; plenty of product managers want to place their own stamp on a product regardless of the value to its users. Or they may have other motivations, such as business demands for short-term revenue or to maintain control or to not compete with their own products, that also aren't in line with their product's users' best interests.
The FOSS community has its own approach to the issue, the ability to fork a project if its developer base gets too out of touch with its user base. While rare, this does happen, and it may be in the process of happening with pidgin itself. Then it simply becomes a classic free-market competition between the two groups.
I'll grant that the skill of balancing listening to one's customers while maintaining forward progress is not necessarily easy to master -- either in the commercial world or the FOSS community. An overly short-term view of customer requirements leads to its own problems. Possibly distributions (which function as integrators) can help provide guidance here -- they may have a higher level view and more opportunities for specialists with these kinds of skills to work with individual projects.
Still, an interesting and thought-provoking piece.
Posted by Robert Krawitz on May 15, 2008 at 04:39 PM PDT #