Re: Who's the idiot that invented voicemail?

In article <42ee996b.20742906@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Richard Bos <rlb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>matthewt@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Matt S Trout) wrote:
>> A certain OSS author decided yesterday to delete his project's mailing list
>> and wiki, but left the latter up briefly so I thought I'd mirror it to
>> provide some semblance of continuity for those of us who rely on this
>> fscking project.
>>
>> The point at which I got an e-mail saying I had to take down the e-mail
>> saying I had take down the wiki was the point at which I gave up on him
>> having any vestiges of sanity left. I wouldn't mind, but this is now the
>> second maintainer disappearance we've suffered in a year[0].
>>
>> Given practically everything we have in production for clients atm relies
>> on said project in some way, shape or form, I shall be spending much of the
>> next 24 hours trying to pick up the pieces and trying to get my own
>> fork/rewrite set up as a proper project.
>>
>> This was Not Part Of The Plan. I am Not Impressed.
>
>So... hold on. There is this open source project. Basically, a volunteer
>program. Your entire job, just about, uses this project. Fine; open
>sores can be useful. Your entire job, just about, _depends_ on this
>project. Possible, but somewhat edgy, since you're relying for your
>bread-and-butter on what is, TAIAP, the whim of an amateur.
>
>But this person bailing out is _not part of your plan_? Come again? You
>had no bailout procedure in place and have to hack it up on the spur of
>the moment? You did not realise that this maintainer could just as
>easily have walked under a bus, or somehow, perhaps unlikely but it has
>happened before, got a _life_ somewhere?
>
>Frankly, you deserve all the overtime you got. If you depend on an open
>source project, you _have_ to have a contingency plan; going flaky is
>not the only way a maintainer can disappear from the face of the earth
>by a long shot.

The maintainer disappearing I wasn't so worried about; that I was willing to
cope with. The maintainer saying "*** this, I'm not talking about the code
at all anymore" so I can't get bugfixes merged is still not an issue; I can
fork. The destruction of the mailing list and the wiki (and his then-refusal
to have anything he'd written for it mirrored) so the community lost most of
its history and cohesion was the part that really annoyed me[0].

My plan was fine with him getting run over by a bus. It didn't however take
into account that while the code was under a safe license, one of the primary
sources of documentation wasn't - and it certainly didn't take into account
that a longtime OSS contributor might attempt to "take back" something they'd
provided to the community in a fit of pique[1].

I have been Insufficiently Cynical, and for that I have been punished[2].

On the upside, the new project now has a 20+ strong IRC channel, an 80+
strong mailing list, and a couple of people have already moved into PFY
roles and are fielding the stupid questions so I can concentrate on the
smart ones. Wonder how long it'll be before the appropriate exponential
suckage curve kicks in ...

[0] This has now been resolved, once a couple of days of calming down took
their effect, and I got an extremely polite apology as well.
[1] Turns out it was a lame attempt to prevent me mirroring the thing because
he wanted somebody else to host the new copy. If the silly *** had
just *said* that ...
[2] And from what I can tell about 98% of the $language community - even of
the clueful subset that I tend to talk to - were also Insufficiently
Cynical. This does not, of course, make the calibration any less wrong.
.