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On 10 October 2010 19:31, Neil Williams <linux@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Sun, 10 Oct 2010 18:35:10 +0100 > John Horne <john.horne@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >> On Sat, 2010-10-09 at 20:39 +0100, tom brough wrote: >> > >> > Putting a Managerial hat on for one moment (yuk) I could >> > understand how nervous management would be to take a product that >> > looked like it was not being developed or moved on. >> > >> Agreed. I was asked by one of our managers a few weeks ago to look at >> an (open-source) project to see if it would do what they wanted, and >> if it was 'alive'. He didn't want something that had no support, and >> wasn't being used or maintained by anyone. > > In ManagementSpeak: > > Past experience is no guarantee of future performance. > > I would venture that these are the same people who have tracker > mortgages and index-linked pensions, so the phrase should be instantly > familiar to those management types. > > Even if a person or group are active today, nobody can guarantee > that this happy condition will remain in place tomorrow. > >> (A simple look at the mailing list archives for 'users' and >> 'developers' seemed to indicate that it certainly was used by others, >> and was actively/currently maintained by a team of people. I reported >> back as such, and they will look into it further.) > > Real life has a habit of calling time on any "under-a-bus" situations > and if people take the same attitude with this as is often seen with > the insurance risk assessments in local government re conker trees, it > is their own fault for not understanding the word *volunteer*. > > (The "bus-problem" is shorthand for all those areas where there is a > single person amongst a group upon whom everything and everyone > actually relies and who then goes under a bus or whatever. The size of > the group is no insurance from the "bus-effect" - it is much more a > factor of group complexity, flexibility and redundancy.) Actually, in my experience of open source (about 10 years of it) the bus problem is much rarer than the natural evolution of ideas that means that a new project can eat an older projects lunch in a surprisingly short time (6 to 12 months) - I've seen an experienced this and it's not actually a bad thing, "superceded" projects don't stop working and tend to have enough userbase if established to provide ongoing support for bugs/patches even if not "actively" developing new features - I know I provided patches, etc for Maypole for long after I moved to Catalyst, and I'd be happy to provide paid support and consultancy (and could probably recommend others, possibly cheaper than me too) to continuing users. The only significant bus-problems I've seen in real life have been Whytheluckystiff inplugging himself from the net and going radio silent without warning, but that didn't cause any of his projects to suddenly wither and die, and Autrijus Tang become Audrey Tang after a very long and hard push on the pugs project which then stalled totally, in this case everything came to stand still for a few months, but not long after Rakudo was born from the ashes (from the lessons and experience and test suite of pugs) and has now released some alpha distributions - and of course, using the same (but now much enlarged and improved) test suite anything that worked on pugs, works on rakudo. A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq