20,741
edits
How the FlightGear project works: Difference between revisions
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
m
How the FlightGear project works (view source)
Revision as of 14:23, 8 February 2012
, 8 February 2012→To be discussed
| Line 37: | Line 37: | ||
* Another important thing is staying focused: it isn't helpful to raise dozens of issues in a short amount of time if you cannot also solve them, regardless of how "real" and valid these issues might be. | * Another important thing is staying focused: it isn't helpful to raise dozens of issues in a short amount of time if you cannot also solve them, regardless of how "real" and valid these issues might be. | ||
* signal/noise ratio | * signal/noise ratio | ||
* Frequently, people keep emphasizing that this attitude is related to their inability of fixing things themselves. Now, we are not going to suggest you learn how to build FG from source or how to program in C++. But rather, we suggest you focus on a handful of issues that truly annoy you, and where you think you could actually help and contribute solving them. That would surely help improving your signal/noise ratio, basically giving you opinions more weight here. There should be a fair share of opportunities to get involved in meaningful ways. We have a bunch of wiki resources to get people started contributing in various ways. | |||
* People asking for increased project management and more coordination may want to ask themselves how they would respond if they were exactly told what to work on, rather than just doing what they are interested in. Seriously, nobody is asking you to contribute within a particular domain at all, which is also a good thing and attracted many of the long-term contributors to the project in the first place. | |||
* When comparing FlightGear to other OSS project, it is important not to compae apples and oranges from a manpower perspective. We don't have the manpower here to establish a proper hierarchy like many of the more prominent projects (think Mozilla/Firefox). There's is TONS of management work happening behind the scenes, there's the Mozilla foundation and there are donations and so on - so Mozilla development is not only about coordinating a bunch of programmers who happen to develop a piece of software in their limited spare time, they have passed that point long ago. | |||
* If you are trying influence things: That's fine and a valid motivation. The thing is however, your ability to bring influence to the project is directly proportional to your impact and track record in the project. Actually, this isn't untypical for most OSS projects.We have people here who have been part of this project "just" voicing ideas, opinions and feature requests - some of whom have been involved for YEARS. While their feedback may be appreciated, their ability to direct things is still fairly limited - especially when compared to people who actually brought changes to FlightGear and who have a track record of doing so (sometimes even within a fairly short amount of time). You can find numerous examples actually, of people who have not been a member of this community for very long, but whose input and feedback is not just appreciated and respected but who are having a certain impact on the direction the project's heading. This is never because of "talking" or discussing things, it is because of DOING things. | |||
* FlightGear has never been in a better shape than it is in right now. In fact, admittedly FlightGear -as a software project- has actually been in a much worse shape for many years (for example: no forums, no wiki, no bug tracker, no git repository, no gitorious merge requests, no build server, no formal release procedures etc)- still it somehow managed to stay around for over 10 years, despite all its deficiencies... | * FlightGear has never been in a better shape than it is in right now. In fact, admittedly FlightGear -as a software project- has actually been in a much worse shape for many years (for example: no forums, no wiki, no bug tracker, no git repository, no gitorious merge requests, no build server, no formal release procedures etc)- still it somehow managed to stay around for over 10 years, despite all its deficiencies... | ||