[OpenWrt-Devel] SVN to GIT transition / paid patch-checking

[Daniel Golle]

Hi!

On Tue, Oct 13, 2015 at 01:22:14PM +0200, Emmanuel Deloget wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 13, 2015 at 1:04 PM, Nemesis <nemesis at ninux.org> wrote:
> > As far as I remember, there's no initiative going on, but the issue was brought up at the summit by different speakers.
> >
> > There was also a quick poll:
> >
> > 1. Kathy Giori asked the attendees to raise their hand if they backed the idea of an OpenWRT foundation
> > I would say half of the presents raised their hands (I did not because I'm not involved so much in OpenWRT and I don't feel entitled to take sides)
> >
> > 2. Kathy asked the attendees to raise their hand if they opposed the idea of an OpenWRT foundation
> > I think there were almost no raised hands or not at all

I believe it's important to note that OpenWrt got quite a lot of users
and contributers who aren't commercially motivated and probably didn't
feel the need to come to an industry-funded summit in first place.
Many here got their roots in the wifi-mesh communities, ie. they are
activists and afaik most of OpenWrt was created as a leasure/hobby
activity. (correct me if that's terribly wrong)
Sure, now that even chip vendors use OpenWrt as the base of their SDKs
and major industry players provide OpenWrt-based BSPs the situation
has certainly changed.
However, I believe the extraordinarily high quality of the code was and
is only possible due to the lack of commercial pressure and because
things were done when people liked to do them and took as long as they
would take (rather than doing stuff you don't feel like doing in that
moment because of some dead-line or commercially motivated commitment)
Quality[1] itself can be quite a good motivator for many of us, and is
imho impossible to achieve if driven by anything but passion and love
for the matter and activity itself (that doesn't mean that it's bad
to be paid for good work, there's nothing wrong with that).
Being a software engineer myself, I'm aware that this is not what $corp
managers believe, and surely, it's still hard work to build something
and most people do need to get paid for at least some of their work in
order to have a good live and not needing to starve.

But yet, it's like comparing arts with advertisement or love with
prostitution. Given these extreme examples, almost everyone can
grasp the difference in quality I'm talking about which also applies
here.

If you want an industry-driven fork, go ahead. But don't force that
model upon an existing community without understanding how major parts
of that said community is operating.
Sure, we can all use funding :)
But my mode-of-operation doesn't have a price-tag on it.
I hope that applies also to the decission-making of most long-term
contributers.


> 
> Wouldn't it be easier if the project is adopted by an umbrella
> organization? There should be one that could be interested in managing
> the pitfalls and dirty bits of the organization, allowing the
> developers to spend their time on the project itself - and not on the
> maintenance of a foundation.

However, I'm happy we are arriving at the core of that matter. It's
(as usual among the technical croud) hidden behind a technical debate,
in this case git vs. subversion.
However, what it is really about is the mode of decission-making and
commercial usability and reliability.

It's ok to use our music, but don't tell anyone how to play.
And sure, feel free to find the magic hat :)


Cheers


Daniel


 [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirsig's_metaphysics_of_Quality
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