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Community

2005-07-24T05:39:57Z

Cytopa:

[[netlabs.org - big inefficent(sic) monster]]?

Community

2005-07-24T05:38:09Z

Cytopa:

[[netlabs.org - big inefficent monster]]?

Netlabs.org - big inefficent monster

2005-07-24T05:34:14Z

Cytopa:

==netlabs.org - big inefficent monster?==

There was a posting in the eCS DevGroup Mailinglist these days which I ([[User:Ktk]]) got forwarded by some netlabs.org coders. Even if the mail writes quite some BS about netlabs.org it's worth commenting it because some points are worth a discussion. Note that I will '''not''' follow the discussion in the original eCS DevGroup mailinglist, for such discussions we have the http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.org.netlabs.community mailinglist.

Also comments to this site itself should go to the Disussion page, simply click on Discussion above.

I didn't change the original content, I just give my comments per paragraph.

Among the reasons Mike Kaply and the Warpzilla team are doing so well:

1) First and foremost: Mike and the Warpzilla team ship product... they
produce. There in no vaporware or deadwood anywhere to be seen. They
ship often and on time.

2) He set up a single group for communications and he regularly drops by
to communicate.

3) He very often asks people what they want or what they think. He even
asked people about the tinderbox fund before he did it.... that's how he
found out about amazon.com. Don't understand estimate how important
communications is.

4) He shows leadership. He is polite but leaves no doubt as to who is
in charge and is who responsible. History has proven that he is
generally correct on issues where I disagree with him. He knows what he
is doing.

5) He tells it like it is. It he doesn't have the time or capability to
fix something he tells everyone that he doesn't and says that someone
else needs to take this on. The team has built up to the point that
others are not only picking up the slack but they are finding and fixing
additional issues and adding new capability with Mike only needing to do
code reviewed and checkin.

Not much to say about this. I personally love Mozilla & the stuff Mike did and does for OS/2 and eCS. I'm also very much impressed by the rest of the team because there are people contributing to it I never heard of. For quite some time I thought I know everyone that codes for OS/2 and eCS ;)

Compare and contrast the Tinderbox drive and Netlabs fund raising. I've
put 10 items under Tinderbox and 10 under Netlabs. Item 1 under
Tinderbox relates to item 1 under Netlabs, etc:

With Kaply's Tinderbox fund drive:

1) The request for funding is very very specific. People know exactly
what their money is going for and exactly why it is being asked for.

That's quite easy for the Mozilla team, after all it's just one project or at least several subprojects that are related to each other. I mean they share the same codebase and such. Most projects at netlabs.org do not have anything in common.

2) Warpzilla produces. No dead projects or vaporware here. It ships
good quality products very regularly.

If this means netlabs.org does not produce anything I'm a bit pissed now... (*calming down*)

3) Funds visibility. You can look on the Amazon site and see the bucks
rolling it. You will also see a very specific report from Mike
concerning exactly what he spent the money on once the purchases are made.

I agree about that one and I can tell you that we are working on that with Mensys. Will be solved later this year.

4) Kaply is a regular poster in the Warpzilla news group. Everybody
knows who Mike is and many have communicated with him at least a couple
of times via direct email on issues. He always answers back and is a
straight shooter. People need a real LIVING person to relate to.
Notice that more often than not we say Mike Kaply and not The Warpzilla
Project.

Uhm so far I considered myself as quite a living person too. I started netlabs.org 7 years ago and I think people pretty much know me. At least I get this impression in the newsgroups, mailinglists & when I visit events like Warpstock Europe. For sure I'm '''not''' alone, netlabs.org is just possible because we have quite some developers out there and it's even for me not easy to know everyone of them personaly :)

5) The Warpzilla web site has only living projects.

commented below

6) Kaply used a very very good site to set up his fund drive.
Amazon.com is easy to use and works well.

see above, will change for us as well. Unless Amazon.com Mensys does '''not''' take a single cent from the money contributed. Now we even fixed the VAT issues so what you pay gets 100% contributed into netlabs.org

7) The tinderbox request is not an ongoing request. Ongoing requests
without a specific urgency behind them don't work well. Requests need
to be on an as needed basis for a really simple, easy to understand
objective where visibility is unlimited.

I partly agree. More below

8) Donations should be viewed as votes. People like to vote for exactly
what their preference is, not for some general idea. Do I want to
donate money into a general fund for driver development? No, that would
suck. I want to be able to pinpoint exact which driver I want. Mike
gave people the ability to vote for something very very specific which
would be used for a very specific purpose. As time passes people will be
able to say "I helped buy that tinderbox."

Again, will be solved, known problem, we are working on it (sorry, I repeat myself)

9) People know who is in charge of The WarpZilla Project. Mike took
charge a long time ago and takes responsibility for how things go.
Folks don't always agree with everything he does but he is there, he
makes decisions, he communicates with folks and it is obvious he is
dedicated to what he is doing.

10) Demonstrated ability to make things happen. As development became
more and more difficult with an old dead compiler Mike found a way to
make a new, modern supported compiler available to continue producing
results.

With all respect, but it was not that easy... Also this compiler wouldn't be where it is now without one guy from netlabs.org contributing a '''lot''' of his sparetime into that. Knut is working for Innotek but without his open source work we would have a serious problem, believe me.

With Netlabs:

1) The request for donations is a request to fund overall operations so
people really don't know exactly what their money is going for or why.

Ok, for the last time in this response: I know that this is a major problem and we will resolve that with Mensys. It will still be possible to contribute to general projects but we will also have a project-related sponsoring. Which means we say to do this project we would need xxx Euros and we will start with it if we have at least yyy Euros. I can't say when yet because of my real life (yeah I do have one, sorry).

2) Netlabs shows a lot of projects but when is the last time something
new better or useful actually shipped? I'd rather have one good product
that ships than many that are dead.

Ok now I '''am''' pissed! Either you are really an ... or you are just blind. We released a) some new stuff the past months like xwlan, dssaver, samba server, samba client... and b) we update quite some projects on a regular base. For sure there are projects that are no longer continued but that's how open source works (or does not work). What should I do with them, delete them? This would be plain stupid because search engines still link to the pages and often there are reasons why there are no updates.

3) No visibility on the amount of donations made nor any accountability
of what the money goes for.

see #1

4) Who runs Netlabs? I certainly have no idea. People really don't
relate as well to faceless web sites.

It may sound arrogant but if you don't think of Adrian Gschwend if you hear netlabs.org you either not follow the VOICE mailinglist, the newsgroups and others or I'm in your killfile.

5) Most Netlabs projects appear to be dead. You can't leave dead
projects laying around. They die, they need to go into the bitbucket!
Or be archived and sent to hobbes pending someone taking an interest.

See #2. It's BS to kill dead projects. Even if it's no longer developed there are reasons to keep the source/binaries/whatever.

6) Last time I looked at Netlabs I think they used Paypal. Ug! Paypal
is a non-starter in my book.

I definitely never ever used Paypal. You should at least visit the pages once before you post such stuff. BTW the page http://about.netlabs.org/?detailcontentregions_id=3 is not that hard to find and gives some information about myself and about sponsoring too. Did you actually ever had a look at the netlabs.org webpage? I start to doubt...

7) Netlabs is an ongoing request where there is no immediate urgency or
specific need. Look at how MozillaZine does it. When the various
annual bills come due they post a request for donations to cover
operating expenses for the next year. They only take donations until
such time as they think they are good to go and they are specific about
where the money is going and why.

Either you repeat yourself or I. See #1

8) Donations should be viewed as votes. Netlabs doesn't allow you to
pin point exactly what you are voting for. In the end you might like
your money to go against one specific project but it is really not your
call, it is the call of whoever is running Netlabs.

Again, see #1. And just to save my honor: I '''do not at all''' take a '''single''' cent for myself. Actually in 2004 I invested 5000 Euro (read: fife thousand) Euros of my very own personal money into netlabs.org projects. Got that?

9) Who was it that is in charge of Netlabs?

Ok it's you that repeats yourself, try to read the netlabs.org webpage! It might help!!

10) Has not demonstrated ability to make things happen. My general
impression is that if things are not going well then whoever is running
Netlabs does not find ways to improve things or find ways to work around
problems. Got to ship product...

Go get a life. I can accept critics but you posted really too much BS and obviously you have no clue about how open source software works. You are very welcome to give me hints how I can improve netlabs.org and I take some stuff you wrote as hints. But unlike Mike I '''never''' worked 100% for netlabs.org, it was and is a spare time project! There is no big company that pays me to make sure I can afford something to eat each day.

Also I really think that netlabs.org did quite a lot for the OS/2 and eCS community the past years and I think we can even do more in the future with some better management of our tasks. But hey, I'm not a god and I do not have endles amounts of spare time.

Adrian Gschwend
founder of netlabs.org

-> the one which is in charge. I hope you got that too now.

Community

2005-07-24T05:34:00Z

Cytopa:

[[netlabs.org - big inefficent(sic) monster]]?

Talk:Community

2005-07-24T03:43:15Z

Cytopa: And this is 'Community' ...

> Ok now I am pissed! Either you are really an ... or you are just blind. <

That's a little bit harsh IMHO. I would rephrase that as "In which cave did you live the last years?" ;-) -Cinc
And it would actually fit a Nick Morrow lived somewhere down in middle/south america before moving back to the US. ;) Markus

There are other sentences as well, which i would rephrase i bit. Like the sentences with BS in it. Even it is BS (at least in the opinion of Ktk) what he was talking about ;-) -diver

Well, the original posting wasn't really backed by good research, we don't have to discuss that.
Question is, why didn't the author bother and what has to be done to make people more aware about netlabs and the netlabs projects. Some/most people obviously think some hobby hackers at netlabs are creating halfbaked junk not useful for the broader audience. Maybe ktk should start to give monthly reports on usenet about what's happening atm. For example giving the changelog of uniaud and warpvision. Both projects are funded by netlabs (partly?) but people out there don't know. Netlabs should be more verbose about such things. The same for the firewire driver (is it funded partly by netlabs or just by OS/2 Dresden?).
Such a monthly report may also contain a complete list of the stuff available in CVS on netlabs so people see there is way more happening than visible. -Cinc

== Completely unadequate comparison! ==

Reading this stupid attack on Netlabs and its founder and main supporter not only upsets himself, but I ([[User:Cbockem]]) must admit that it upsets me too (without being otherwise too much related to Netlabs!).

=== General ===

First of all, if that comparison between Netlabs / Adrian Gschwend and Warpzilla / Mike Kaply should be of any value, it should start with stating the main differences between the two projects (instead of just discussing both like commercial businesses):

* Warpzilla is one single, prominent project, with one leading person. Even though this person is (was?) even partially paid by IBM for what he does for Warpzilla, the project lives of course a lot on his personal engagement. And of course a number of other, less visible supporters.

* Netlabs is in the first place a website supporting OS/2 developers, not actively "doing projects". So the role it plays for the different projects is mostly like what Sourceforge does at a larger scale with many more projects: Give the project specific group a "place to live" with their code, their discussions etc. How far this really happens is then up to the project relative responsibles! Furthermore Netlabs also started to organize funding for SOME of the projects it hosts. The main "driving person" of Netlabs (besides also a number of supporters) is not and has never been paid by anybody for his Netlabs work, so the project is 100% driven by personal engagement.

For the rest the "10 points" come down finally to only two:

=== Funding ===

There are two completely legitimate ways of organizing funding:

* Do it in a very specific, project related way or

* Do it in an open way, giving the responsible persons much more freedom to put the money where the need is greatest

While for the Warpzilla project only the first way is at all possible (because it is only one project), Netscape would best support both: Free, open donations giving Netlabs the freedom of supporting things where the need is greatest, and for those who do not want to give as much trust in these people a way to donate more project specific.

No need to debate which is better: they both have their advantages and disadvantages!

==== Technical remark ====

This praising of the "Amazon method" is for me a very, very much American only point of view! Because I at least would never donate one single cent to a project working with the Amazon method for the simple reason that it can only be done with a credit card! And as long as I can do without (which is not too difficult here) I will not support this "bank funding system": I want to rather fund projects! And this I can easily do via Mensys, because there I can choose the way I want to do my payment and do it the way it fits my needs. (Sure everyone who wants to can also donate via Mensys with his credit card ;-)).

=== Efficiency ===

The efficiency of the Warpzilla project depends a lot on Mike Kaply - and he takes that responsibility with great success, as it seems. But for the efficiency of the Netlabs projects Adrian Gschwend '''cannot''' be made responsible! He never claimed that, nor would he be able to do it: He would have to close down Netlabs entirely if people would expect that from him!

Actually the efficiency of every single Netlabs project is 100% up to the respective project related developers. Exactly the same way as it is with Sourceforge: Also there many projects look more or less "dead", while others are very active. But even that can be a wrong impression, because certain "visibly dead" projects are still active anyway, maybe reorganizing, or some lonely person writing code in his spare time, not presenting it from day to day. So it wouldn't make sense at all if Adrian would close down projects not showing any change for, say, one year or so! Even really "dead" project (i.e.: nobody left to work with them currently) are always open to being re-vitalized by anybody taking it up! Which is again a good reason not to close these projects.

=== Bottom line ===

Criticism has to be possible, and I am sure Adrian is able to take it. And he also proves that if he admits that the current open funding is not adequate for all potential donators; now that will be changed, allowing for also more project specific donations.

But the kind of general unqualified attacks coming with this "comparison" is 100% contraproductive: As I already stated above, Netlabs is 100% driven by personal enthusiasm, engagement and spare time work! (Only some projects are getting some limited funding.) But also enthusiasm needs to be "funded". I know that Adrian has his ways to "self-fund" his enthusiasm so he can live with the one or other unqualified attack of the current style, but I am sure it still '''costs''' him enthusiasm and spare time he would be able to invest in much more productive ways! Is that what the writer really intends to achieve??

Because if the writer of the attack would be '''interested''' in a more efficient and productive Netlabs he would 1) '''engage''' himself in a productive way, maybe in one of the projects he would like to see more active, and 2) if he sees problematic points discuss them in a limited, very '''specific''' way, because only then there is a chance that they can be solved.

It's hard having to defend oneself against such unfounded attacks!

Cinc: Part of the problem is that the author of the mail lives in a different world. He doesn't use the tools we (netlabs people, developers, OS/2 users in germany) use. He apparently doesn't use too much open source software other than Mozilla. He has no deep knowledge of the european developer scene (if any). He has no knowledge which tools are used by a lot of developers. For example he focusses solely on Watcom C when speaking about compilers ignoring the gcc suite completely. He's often ignoring ports from *nix completely when there're similar tools from IBM. Even if these IBM tools may be inferior or buggy as hell.
Standard disclaimer: that's my impression after reading mails on a mailing list for quite some years now. I may be completely wrong...

== And this is 'Community' ... ==

Some years ago I visited the LA Zoo. I don't recall exactly, but I seem to remember a sign near some of the cages that read:

'PLEASE DON'T FEED THE MONKEYS'

I'm struck how the sign may be so relevant to this, the first, article in our 'Community Portal'.

This is not USENET.
Let's just build and enjoy community with the 'Community portal'.

Or maybe my understanding of 'community' is faulty.