[CentOS] How can a company help, officially?

[Karanbir Singh]

On 04/12/2011 05:19 PM, Brian Mathis wrote:
>> Fixing the timing of release is something we get from getting the
>> process into the right place. And not the other way around. There seems
> NO ONE IS SAYING TO PUSH CRAP OUT THE DOOR JUST FOR THE SAKE OF
> GETTING IT OUT.  EVERYONE IS SAYING TO OPEN THE PROCESS SO THEY CAN
> HELP GET THE HIGH QUALITY STUFF OUT THE DOOR FASTER.

erm, you seem confused. Because that is sort of the exact point that I 
was making - get the process right, and if its in the right place we get 
the free win from faster output.

> This is another area where the project needs to be brought into the
> 21st century.  "find and promote people who have expertise in specific
> functionality".  This is how closed-source corporations run their
> projects.  Open source allows you to tap into the "long tail" of

You also seem confused about the idea of the long tail, there are no 
caps or limits being enforced, as closed source projects do, on the 
contributions that people make. I'm not proposing that clueless idiots 
get involved, just that people who do get involved should know what they 
are doing. And perhaps get enough people involved so that if a few 
people are not around when needed, there are always enough to pickup on 
the slack created from that.

> people who might have time to contribute 1 or 2 things, but not become
> a complete owner of a subsystem.  With many people contributing like
> this, the main project committers would vet and incorporate changes,
> maintaining the level of trust while reducing their workload.  Every

Again, either I failed to communicate this or you didnt get it - large 
part of the plan is to bring this sort of a contributor base into a loop 
that then feeds into what is the main project committers. It could also 
mean splitting the QA process into the QA team and Release Team with the 
core build team taking care of the convert from source to binary 
process. Also, giving people ownership of something they enjoy doing and 
allowing them to be productive within that space is'nt something thats 
either open source or closed source centric - its a nice gesture to 
recognise people doing the lifting.

Also, if you think that just having something out there that people can 
randomly drive-by and fix is going to work, you must be either really 
clueless or just new to open source.

- KB