Re: Kickstarter was not successful... but it did help things...

[Doc O'Leary]

In article <mailman.9700.1387489268.10748.discuss-gnustep@gnu.org>,
 Ivan Vuãica <ivucica@gmail.com> wrote:

> Linus happens to have the luxury

Nothing "happens to" about it.  He's figured out how to successfully 
lead his project.  Why not discuss it and see what lessons can be 
learned rather than writing it off as "luxury"?

> Gregory can't come and simply order (e.g.) Fred to work on a UIKit
> implementation. He can gently nudge in that direction, if Fred feels like
> working on it already.

There are still many things that *can* be tried in order to herd the 
available cats.  I have suggested some, but things just seem too toxic 
around here.  It remains up to Gregory and the rest of the community to 
take a step back and decide exactly what overall goals should be 
front-and-center to GNUstep and go how to go about cleaning things up.

> But that's something really hard to do remotely, in a controlled fashion.
> That's something really hard to do when everyone has 'real lives',
> interests, friends, pubs to visit, restaurants to consume, etc., and
> there's only a small number of people even working on the project.

Why?  Seriously, think about why that might be so, and what can and 
*should* be done to change that.  I think you'll find it is mainly 
because people aren't given a good sense how the pieces fit into the 
whole.  I don't need to be nudged or have my hand held if I understand 
the importance of the work that needs to be done.

> Note that those were small things, small grievances we had. To go further
> down the road to "OS X and iOS friendliness", if we want to distribute an
> effort, we need to divide things into smaller chunks that people can
> resolve over weekends, list them, and see who picks up what. Small things
> people can do quickly.

Exactly wrong.  Agile-level stupidity.  Yes, the big problems need to be 
reduced to a manageable size, but the *root* issue still remains that of 
defining exactly what direction it *is* that GNUstep wants to go for 
that or any other issue.  If the question is "How do I get to the 
store?", it is *meaningless* to say "The route is defined by waypoints, 
each of which can be travelled in a straight line".  Yours is *not* the 
way to manage a successful project.

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