[haiku-development] Re: AboutSystem window credits (was: Testing the poll)
- From: "André Braga" <meianoite@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 30 Aug 2008 18:13:58 -0300
(Not quoting any of the previous emails on purpose)
Lines of code are by no means the measure of someone's contribution to
a project, nor number of commits. There's foreign code being imported;
there's fundamental code that's small and once written, rarely touched
again; there's tons of code that's rewritten over and over due to
following the buzzword du jour (think Linux).
There's people who never wrote a single line of code and yet are *the*
driving force behind a project (think Steve Jobs). There are people
who wrote embarassingly crappy code and yet are *the* driving force
behind a project (think younger Bill Gates). There are people who are
eminently silent as real life individuals, but are geniuses and the
very cornerstone of a project (think young Steve Wozniak). There are
those who, in later years become eccentric and dare I say sour about a
perceived lack of recognition (again, think Woz).
I myself would love to have my name plastered all over the AboutSystem
credits, and I was actually *really* surprised to see it mentioned
there, despite recognising that I have not materialised a *single*
contribution to Haiku other than suggesting a butt-ugly macro a few
days ago.
And boy, am I afraid of voicing my opinions here; and it's not just
about my low self-esteem and seeing that most of the things I'm most
excited about and invest most of my time into turn out being colossal
flops, which further contributes to my fear of being criticised, yadda
yadda. I guess this is public knowledge already, as I've written about
these things in the past, on emails to [openbeos] and blog posts.
See, I was *paid* to code a scheduler that for all practical purposes
is viewed as vapourware and I'd be lucky if more than 5% of the
community considers me something better than a lazy-ass charlatan. But
in my point of view it's my very bones and marrow turned into code,
it's the best algorithms I've ever written, and I'm greatly ashamed by
not having released it yet, my real life be damned. But I'm pressing
on, on the pace I'm able to keep. Because it was just too good a ride
to feel part of this project.
We have no other driving force than passion and the belief that
somehow what we're doing is going to make the virtual world a little
more pallatable. We have no companies to back our development, and
we're not short on real life issues, be they unemployement, getting
married, moving to another country, burning out, the fear of having
wasted our own youth writing machine code instead of love letters,
illness, depression, loved ones passing away, equipment being stolen,
toes being stepped on, RSI, car crashes -- each and every of those
have actually happened to members of this project.
Yes, there's the issue of pride, on both camps. It feels good to be
part of an open source project. It feels liberating and empowering to
use open source software. As annoyed as everyone gets when someone
drops out of the blue and expresses how he or she thinks something is
supposed to be done, often in a do-or-be-doomed tone, this can only
mean that what is being done here IS touching people. It IS being
noticed. People outside the most obscure of cliques DO care and have
high hopes for what can be accomplished here.
Frankly I didn't expect to see another wave of friction and heated
discussions this soon, but this can only mean that Haiku has grown way
beyond what we perceive as being its circle of influence.
Sometimes it feels, to me, that it's been only a few days since we
managed to boot into app_server; but Holy Deity, we're self-hosting
already, we do Firefox, we're starting to seriously consider letting
other projects deprecate BeOS support and embrace Haiku.
I'm going to chalk this discussion up to growing pains, and urge
everyone to *by no means* let go of the thrill, the excitement, the
wonder, the driving passion, but at the same time realise that Haiku
is not anyone's pet project anymore -- as a matter of fact it's a
501(c)(3) organization. It has outgrown the grip of *everyone* in here
as individuals BY FAR.
And before we have a third wave of friction and heated discussions and
egos being hurt and public spats and whatnot, it REALLY is about time
to formalise the socio-political structure of this project, instead of
taking decidions ad hoc. They way things currently stand makes people
feel entitled to impose their views, not have enough of a voice to
actually be heard and perhaps waste excellent ideas on deaf ears, or
both!
I guess this is what Koki is trying to say all along.
Cheer up! Haiku's turned 7!
A.
Other related posts:
