[PLUG-Devel] "managing" open source projects

[Ted Gould]

On Tue, 5 Sep 2006, Josh Coffman wrote:
>  Anyone know how large OSS project work on a
> day-2-day and dev cylcle basis? In particular, the
> kernel team.. don't they mostly use email and IM to
> coordinate? And how do they appoint tasks?

I'm a developer on the Inkscape project (http://www.inkscape.org -- tell 
all your friends :)

I think, judging by the question itself, you're thinking about it wrong. 
There is no 'appointing,' it is more like a bunch of people with a shared 
vision of the common good, and all wishing to get there.  The way that 
you'd 'manage' an open source project is by doing it.  Contribute code. 
If you've got good ideas, people will help, they'll be motivated by your 
excellent idea.  If you don't, you'll find it very difficult to get your 
patches committed :)

Now, this is different than working on a distributed team.  Many projects 
work with distributed teams (as Hans talked about) -- when you're 
motivating people with money, you can take that money away based on them 
not doing something.  So 'assigning' makes more sense.  Probably the only 
way most hackers would attempt an Exchange plugin for Evolution ;)

I don't know if that helped, but I think a good way to think about it is 
"Who assigned Ted to answer your question on this mailing list?"  It is 
very much the same, but with the response being in C rather than English 
(not good English mind you)

 		--Ted