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netlabs.org - big unefficent monster?

There was a posting in the eCS developer Mailinglist these days which I (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 developer mailinglist, for such discussions we have the http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.org.netlabs.community mailinglist.

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.

5) The Warpzilla web site has only living projects.

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

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.

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."

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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...