On Thu, 7 Nov 2002, Chris McCormick wrote:
Infact, I'd say that the whole basis of open source development is about social protocols rather than programatic protocols. Anyone could take the sources to the Linux kernel or Pd and rename it to "McCormix" or "unpure-data" a lot like what happened with Xemacs. But as long as the project has good maintainership like Miller or Linus provide, people will continue to follow correct social protocol and defer their additions/modifications of the source to that central maintainer. In a way this is the perfect blend of democracy and socialism. If only we could design the code of governance and law in the same way maybe we'd live in a utopia. That or total anarchy, which might be just as fun. [/perhaps]
Sure, but on the large, successful projects, those social protocols are enforced by maintainers. Look at how Linux, Debian, GNOME, KDE, GNUstep, etc. etc. ad nasuem work. They are all broken up into sections with maintainers controling each section and permissions to enforce that.
If you don't have permissions to edit a file, then you submit a diff to the maintainter. If you start doing a lot of work on a section, then the maintainer gives you access. Alan Cox is the perfect example of this. But I think that even Alan Cox doesn't have full access to the linux sources (I could be wrong).
I am not advocating this because I want to see pure-data carved up into little fiefdoms. This is a tried and true structure for developing software with many developers contributing. Plus it could help MSP to get the pd code into CVS sooner, since he could work off of CVS alone, without having to develop the test suite needed to allow multiple developers.
.hc
zen \ \ \[D[D[D[D