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> Good creative collaboration is never democratic or equal (counterexamples?). Great projects must have a lead architect. Funny, I think it's precisely the opp

by js8 9y ago

> Good creative collaboration is never democratic or equal (counterexamples?). Great projects must have a lead architect. Funny, I think it's precisely the opposite. I don't think most creative people can thrive under a strict hierarchy (some famous creative people had even trouble to keep a normal job). It's true that groups of creative people sometimes cooperate, but almost always like equals. One of the famous counterexamples I can give you is the Monty Python collaboration, which was strictly democratic. There are also plenty examples of creative collaborations between two people. In open source software, where there is a hierarchy, it is rather informal. Linus is not a single "lead architect" of Linux; would he enforce a bad decision that most developers would disagree with, he would be forked away. He has no choice than to respect meritocratic wishes of other developers, if he wants to stay "in charge". There were open source projects that tried a more heavy handed way of architectural management, and they failed - such as GCC or XFree86.

feikname 9y ago
> There were open source project that tried a more heavy handed way of architectural management, and they failed - such as GCC A lot of people have been moving to clang, but I'm quite sure GCC is still strong. What do you mean by failed? A link backing this claim would be nice too, as I couldn't find any (although I just probably didn't search it right).
- js8 9y ago
  Ahh, youngsters.. :-) I am not talking about Clang, I am talking about EGCS, to quote from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection : "As GCC was licensed under the GPL, programmers wanting to work in other directions—particularly those writing interfaces for languages other than C—were free to develop their own fork of the compiler, provided they meet the GPL's terms, including its requirements to distribute source code. Multiple forks proved inefficient and unwieldy, however, and the difficulty in getting work accepted by the official GCC project was greatly frustrating for many.[17] The FSF kept such close control on what was added to the official version of GCC 2.x that GCC was used as one example of the "cathedral" development model in Eric S. Raymond's essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar. In 1997, a group of developers formed Experimental/Enhanced GNU Compiler System (EGCS) to merge several experimental forks into a single project.[17][18] The basis of the merger was a GCC development snapshot taken between the 2.7 and 2.81 releases. Projects merged included g77 (Fortran), PGCC (P5 Pentium-optimized GCC), many C++ improvements, and many new architectures and operating system variants.[19] EGCS development proved considerably more vigorous than GCC development, so much so that the FSF officially halted development on their GCC 2.x compiler, blessed EGCS as the official version of GCC and appointed the EGCS project as the GCC maintainers in April 1999. With the release of GCC 2.95 in July 1999 the two projects were once again united." A similar thing happened couple years later in XFree86 community: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFree86 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFree86
nabla9 9y ago
De facto hierarchy matters. Informal, 'light handed', and voluntary are just examples of organizational hierarchies. >He has no choice than to respect meritocratic wishes of other developers On the contrary. Linus can enforce his vision against majority of other senior developers because here is inherent costs friction in forking Linux. It would require large number of misguided decisions for any serious fork to emerge.
- js8 9y ago
  > On the contrary. Linus can enforce his vision against majority of other senior developers because here is inherent costs friction in forking Linux I challenge you to find an example where he did that. > It would require large number of misguided decisions for any serious fork to emerge. In the case of GCC, this wasn't true at all. All it took was being too conservative, and not including contributions fast enough.

by js8 9y ago

feikname 9y ago

> There were open source project that tried a more heavy handed way of architectural management, and they failed - such as GCC A lot of people have been moving to clang, but I'm quite sure GCC is still strong. What do you mean by failed? A link backing this claim would be nice too, as I couldn't find any (although I just probably didn't search it right).

js8 9y ago
Ahh, youngsters.. :-) I am not talking about Clang, I am talking about EGCS, to quote from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection : "As GCC was licensed under the GPL, programmers wanting to work in other directions—particularly those writing interfaces for languages other than C—were free to develop their own fork of the compiler, provided they meet the GPL's terms, including its requirements to distribute source code. Multiple forks proved inefficient and unwieldy, however, and the difficulty in getting work accepted by the official GCC project was greatly frustrating for many.[17] The FSF kept such close control on what was added to the official version of GCC 2.x that GCC was used as one example of the "cathedral" development model in Eric S. Raymond's essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar. In 1997, a group of developers formed Experimental/Enhanced GNU Compiler System (EGCS) to merge several experimental forks into a single project.[17][18] The basis of the merger was a GCC development snapshot taken between the 2.7 and 2.81 releases. Projects merged included g77 (Fortran), PGCC (P5 Pentium-optimized GCC), many C++ improvements, and many new architectures and operating system variants.[19] EGCS development proved considerably more vigorous than GCC development, so much so that the FSF officially halted development on their GCC 2.x compiler, blessed EGCS as the official version of GCC and appointed the EGCS project as the GCC maintainers in April 1999. With the release of GCC 2.95 in July 1999 the two projects were once again united." A similar thing happened couple years later in XFree86 community: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFree86 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFree86

nabla9 9y ago

De facto hierarchy matters. Informal, 'light handed', and voluntary are just examples of organizational hierarchies. >He has no choice than to respect meritocratic wishes of other developers On the contrary. Linus can enforce his vision against majority of other senior developers because here is inherent costs friction in forking Linux. It would require large number of misguided decisions for any serious fork to emerge.

js8 9y ago
> On the contrary. Linus can enforce his vision against majority of other senior developers because here is inherent costs friction in forking Linux I challenge you to find an example where he did that. > It would require large number of misguided decisions for any serious fork to emerge. In the case of GCC, this wasn't true at all. All it took was being too conservative, and not including contributions fast enough.