On Feb 18, 2008 7:48 PM, Greg Knaddison - GVS <Greg@growingventuresolutions.com> wrote:

...

Now, I have to disagree with Victor a little bit. While "it's ready
when it's ready" is a common mantra for open source projects the
Ubuntu team is showing how it is not a necessary condition for good
open source projects. Without a doubt one fundamental rule of open
source is, however, "scratch your own itch." I bring that up because
a lot of people are saying "Developers should have to do this, module
maintainers should have to do that."

Cool, well I think "scratch your own itch" is equivalent to "it's ready when it's ready".

In that what I am trying to defend is bazaar thinking as against cathedral creep...

"It's ready when it is ready" is not some lackadaisical excuse to be lazy. It means that the new features are brought in precisely because the community is anxious to have them and therefore to provide the code and testing for it. Which is the equivalent to what you are saying about "scratch your own itch", which indeed is a concept at the heart of the Open Source business model.

And I agree with Nancy about metrics and ratings... I don't think a lot of bureaucratic rules are going to help, or that more rules necessarily makes things better. It's quality, and that has historically come from an unfettered open source model (because a thousand eyes see more than a cathedral prism).

The concept of "it's ready when it's ready" means that instead of some arbitrary business interest being served for some corporation so it can shove its planned obsolescence down the throat of consumers, it is the community which determines progress, in fulfilling their own REAL needs (not ones invented by some corporation), and it is the community which has to put its money (effort) where its mouth is, in order for the quality to be built in.

That's what has to be defended.

So, let's scratch away, I say.

saludos,

Victor Kane
http://awebfactory.com.ar