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RE: Is the eCos Open Source development model at risk?


Personally, I don't believe the model to be at risk.  I understand that the
eCos maintainers have full (in some cases, more than full) time jobs
supporting paid eCos customers.  If I were a paying customer, I would expect
a different level of responsiveness.

I too, have submitted patches that take a little while to get reviewed, but
that's not slowing me down -- I submit the patches on the list in order to
contribute back to the community.  In the mean time, if friends, family, or
strangers are looking for updates to the OMAP support, I ship them out
directly.

In the mean time, I benefit from the peer review of my patches.  Once they
get reviewed, the eCos team has genuinely helpful and insightful comments
about my code, as well as nit-picky comments that server to keep lawyers
from getting too much business :-).  That makes my end product that much
more robust, so I win.

If I don't have write access to the repository, that's fine with me.  As I
said, I can always ship out a patch on an as-requested basis.  If that model
ever starts to slow me down, then I'll start yelling for a quicker
turnaround, but it's not an issue.  In the mean time, I appreciate the
quality control of a limited set of people who do have write access.

Just my $.02

--wpd




> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael Checky [mailto:Michael_Checky@Thermoking.com] 
> Sent: Monday, June 16, 2003 11:08 AM
> To: ecos-devel@sources.redhat.com
> Subject: Is the eCos Open Source development model at risk?
> 
> 
> To the eCos maintainers,
> 
> I might be ignorant of how other Open Source development 
> projects actually
> work, but I thought the model was something similar to the following:
> 
> 1. Because eCos is Open Source, anybody can use the code for their own
> development projects.
> 2. To keep eCos moving forward, everybody who uses eCos in their
> development projects are encouraged to "give back" to the 
> eCos project.
> Bug fixes, new features, new ports, upgraded documentation, 
> etc. are all
> candidates for "giving back".
> 3. The "eCos Maintainers", i.e., the people who have write 
> access to the
> eCos CVS repository, then filter these contributions to make 
> sure the eCos
> sources maintain their high quality.
> 
> Implicit in this model, is the requirement that the "eCos Maintainers"
> acknowledge contributions from the rest of us.  
> Acknowledgement does not
> mean that every contribution has to be added to the 
> repository, after all
> eCos quality has to be maintained.  But if someone takes the time and
> effort to make what they consider a reasonable or even valuable
> contribution, the "maintainers" need to at least make an effort at to
> acknowledge the contribution, so that the contributors don't end up
> thinking that their time and effort was totally wasted.
> 
> Acknowledgement can take many forms.  For example:
> 1. "Your contribution has merit, when I have the time, I'll 
> consider it."
> This implies that it wil be considered in the relatively near future.
> 2. "Sorry, your contribution does not meet the high quality 
> of eCos, or
> it's not well thought out enough, or it incomplete, or it 
> conflicts with
> something else.  Please reorganize it and resubmit it."
> 
> I know everybody's time is overallocated, but there's not 
> exactly a flood
> of user contributions.  And I maintain, without 
> acknowledgement, users will
> not continue to make contributions.  Furthermore, if there 
> really is no
> time to acknowledge contributions, then open up write access 
> to the eCos
> repository and let the users add their contributions directly 
> (this is not
> an option that I really like).
> 
> Obviously I felt the need to write this because I believe I 
> have submitted
> worthwhile contributions and they seem to have been ignored.  
> They are:
> 
> 1. A rewrite of the Samsung S3C4510 ethernet driver.
> http://sources.redhat.com/ml/ecos-devel/2003-05/msg00007.html
> http://sources.redhat.com/ml/ecos-devel/2003-05/msg00009.html
> 
> 2. A patch to fix a compile error
> http://sources.redhat.com/ml/ecos-devel/2003-05/msg00010.html
> 
> 3. A patch to fix a link error
> http://sources.redhat.com/ml/ecos-patches/2003-06/msg00001.html
> 
> 4. A patch to fix a compiler optimization error
> http://sources.redhat.com/ml/ecos-patches/2003-04/msg00110.html
> 
> 5. A patch to add functionality to serial.h
> http://sources.redhat.com/ml/ecos-patches/2003-03/msg00171.html
> 
> Thanks for your time
> Michael Checky
> 
> 
> 


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