[IAEP] Working with a commercial entity.

[David Farning]

On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 6:20 PM, Martin Langhoff
<martin.langhoff at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 6:52 PM, Jonas Smedegaard <dr at jones.dk> wrote:
>> Making deals with
>> commercial partners have a tendency to spawn discrete communication and work
>> shared openly but as a result, not a peer process (a famous example is that
>> of Google Android release process of linux kernel patches).
>
> Actually, most of the kernel development these days is funded. The
> planning, design, development, review and rework are done openly. All
> teh technical work is open and transparent, that's all.
>
> Android, of a thousand of funded projects, has been mismanaged from
> the PoV of the kernel upstream. Sure. But the correlation you are
> trying to make is not there. The evidence is overwhelmingly on the
> other side.
>
> cheers,
>

All of the participants on this thread have identified potential
strengths and potential weakness of commercial projects working
together with community projects.

I expect that transparency will be my biggest problem.  Not because I
am doing anything super secret, but because I am reaching outside of
the open source community and working mostly with educators and
deployers.  Many of them have little of no experience working with
open source development methodologies.  Thus it will take ramp up time
to acclimate new developers to the community.

WRT to crowding out.  This tends to happen when 'paid developers'
operate as a block and give each other more authority then developers
outside the block.  As such _all_ of the Sugar developers_ I am
working with are doing bug fixes -- which must be pushed upstream.  It
is pretty hard to argue that fixing bugs, many of which have been open
for years, is crowding out others.  This issue may come up again as
the particular group of developers I am working with become more
experience and earn commit and maintainer authority.

The bottom line is that some communities and companies find ways to
work effectively together and others don't.

david