[Python-ideas] Iterative development

[Amber Yust]

I agree with you Chris, but can we keep religion out of this?

On Wed Jan 29 2014 at 7:30:32 AM, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 11:29 PM, anatoly techtonik <techtonik at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > You start with people who have full exclusive rights and contributing
> then
> > compare them to people who are willing to help, but don't do this. Then
> you
> > remove the obstacles to include these people.
>
> There's a fundamental misunderstanding behind this, I think.
>
> Contributions are valued, yes, but the purpose of an open source
> project does not begin and end at "encouraging contributions from
> every person on the planet". The goal of Python is to be a useful and
> usable programming language, and if that's best served by a single
> person doing all the coding, then that's how the project should be
> run. (I'm preeeeeetty confident that's not the case, though.)
>
> There's a general feeling around the world that dictatorships are bad,
> democracy is good, and the more people you have involved in something,
> the better. While this is not entirely false, it's not entirely true
> either. In the Bible, in the book of Proverbs, God tells us several
> times that multiple people's advice is of value. [1] [2] [3] But
> that's advice, not decision making. When it comes down to a final
> decision, it's almost always best to have a single person decide. A
> business has a CEO, an orchestra have a conductor, there's only one
> steering wheel in a car. And ultimately, trying to make every single
> thought behind every single decision public is counter-productive too.
> Ever tried to answer a child's "Why? Why? Why?" machine-gun? Yeah.
>
> On another project, I've contributed a large number of patches. Some
> fix bugs, some add features, some just fix little typos in
> documentation. All of them were simply submitted to the core team,
> reviewed, and ultimately applied, rejected, or modified. I'm not a
> core dev. I can't push to the git repository. But if I were to be
> given that power, it would be for reasons of convenience (if the core
> devs decide that all my patches are getting applied anyway, and it's
> easier for them to let me push my own), not transparency. You want to
> know what's going on? Get involved. Then you'll know.
>
> The people who care about the project will find a way to contribute.
> That's a fundamental of the open source model. You don't like the
> agreement that has to be signed before your patches will be accepted?
> Then contribute by reviewing other people's patches, or verifying bug
> reports, or whatever. Onus is not on the python.org legal team to make
> everything work for you; it's their job to make everything work for
> the PSF. I haven't looked into the specifics of the agreement in
> detail, but I'm confident that the PSF would not demand something just
> for the sake of bureaucracy, so I'd trust that there's good reason for
> all of it. (And hey. if you don't want to sign that, you can just
> declare that your contributions are public domain, IIRC.)
>
> I'm sure it's very American to demand that the people in power tell
> you what they're doing. (Or insert any other country name there,
> though I think the USA is at the forefront of this.) Trouble is, open
> source projects simply aren't built that way.
>
> ChrisA
>
> [1] Prov 11:14 http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=proverbs%2011:
> 14
> [2] Prov 15:22 http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=proverbs%2015:
> 22
> [3] Prov 24:6 http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=proverbs%2024:6
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