Blogroll
- Aitch
- Andrew Patterson
- Doc Searls
- Frank PS
- Mads Toftum
- Mikael Jansson
- Shades of Grey
- Ted Leung
- The Digital Aviator
- The Old Man and the Street
- Tony Finch
- Wendy Seltzer
Categories
- ASF (14)
- Butter (22)
- Concrete5 (8)
- desktop (41)
- development (10)
- feathercast (7)
- General (394)
- laptop (25)
- mobile (87)
- Phone (10)
- Photography (5)
- Soapbox (10)
- Telescope (6)
- wind farm (11)
Meta
- Log in
- Entries RSS
- Comments RSS
- WordPress.org
letting go
Posted on Monday, 3rd April 2006 by david
One trait that I’ve found most of the people working on open source share is that they find it hard to let go. I’m guilty of this myself, but have, over the years, found that it’s a neccesity if sanity is to be preserved!
When you start a project you have a firm vision of where it’s headed. You beaver away, working and over time you mould it to your vision. The vision may change, but it’s still your vision. At some point this, sadly, becomes a problem. With a group of people working on a project things will not always agree with “your vision”. The direction of the project now needs to be moulded and controlled by the group, not by a single mind. It’s not always an easy transition, especially if the collective direction differs from your own.
Having invested your time and effort into any such emerging and growing project it can be hard to cope with this transition. It’s easy to become a roadblock to further progress, rejecting all new ideas that don’t fit within the “bubble of your vision”, abandoning logic and reason in favour of dogma.
I suspect that, if honest, most of us have been on both sides of this situation. Presently I find myself in such a position with projects.apache.org. Having worked hard to get it off the ground it’s now been taken over and moved on by others – largely without my input. I find myself rewriting every email I send related to the project in order to avoid sounding too negative or dismissive of the effort s now being applied. I’m likely not doing a good job!
It’s strange and slightly awkward, but I know it’s all part of the process that the projects site needs to undergo to be viable in the longer term. It won’t last forever.
This entry was posted in ASF, General. Bookmark the permalink.
3 Responses to letting go
Just because one person steps up doesn’t mean another has to step back.
I would love to hear more about your ideas and vision for the project. The only thing that I know we disagreed on was whether the site was ready to go live. And I only heard about that from you after-the-fact.
Letting go is part of growing up in opensource, and it’s hard, I understand. Maybe the most hard part is that others cannot understand the difficulty, because most of it is purely emotional and without objective reason.
But once you learn to do it, it becomes easy. As time goes by, you can learn that it’s nice to sit back and see others work on what you have started. And you will see that it’s not important if others have different priorities, as long as you are able to bring your’s forward. All it takes is being able to look beyond the immediate, and thing in the long term.
It’s a bit like learning to drive: at first you look at the road in front of you and have to correct route every moment, but then you learn to look at the horizon and keep the route more easily.
Rule with an iron fist!
No… seriously though, I think there are projects where the community aspect only goes so far, and a benevolent dictator is a good thing to have. One of the problems that Tcl has had over the years is that its benevolent dictator, John Ousterhout, left for greener pastures (a successful startup which netted him quite a bit of money). Now the language is ruled by committee, and progresses slowly because of it.