Re: outsider's perspective

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Tuesday, May 27, 2003 at 15:32:49 (-0700), Steve deRosier wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: outsider's perspective
>
> As Don already pointed out, this is very unfair.  I don't have any 
> interest working with a project that is held tightly by a very small 
> group of CVS gurus that feel that their way is the only way to do it. 

The truth is that a small project like CVS (or like a mail transport or
any other "small" program that one programmer can easily understand) is
indeed actually best managed and maintained by a very small group of
maintainers, or even by one person, provided that the group or the one
have a really strong vision of what the program should do (unless
they're so lucky as to have a fixed and well defined standard to
implement).

Even something as big as the Linux kernel would never have succeeded if
there were not a very small team of "gurus" carefully selecting what
actualy gets included in it.

>  Why would I spend time 
> trying to learn the CVS codebase and then make changes if I feel that 
> whatever I do is simply going to be summarily rejected anyway?

Would you rather pay more money for a commercial product?  Would you
rather spend more time writing your tools from scratch?  It's your
decision -- nobody is forcing you to work on and use CVS.

With open-source software you are free to adapt that software to your
needs without having to start from scratch.  You're also free to share
your changes, but at the same time other users are free to ignore your
changes too.

-- 
                                                                Greg A. Woods

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