The beastie boot menu.

[Brad Knowles]

At 5:10 PM -0800 2004-11-30, Chris Pressey wrote:

>  OK.  I'm certainly open to a better method for evaluating the direction
>  of open-source projects.  Did you have one in mind?

	If you want to use your backout request metric, then at least 
calculate that on a per capita basis.  Count the number of 
committers, and then count the number of backout requests in a given 
period of time.  Then compare per capita numbers with other projects.

	This won't give you a true apples-apples comparison, because this 
issue is almost certainly not really scaled linearly, but at least 
it's closer than what you seem to have done so far.


	I'm sure that others can come up with recommendations that are 
even better.  This was just off the top of my head.

>                                    Except, as noted, the current mission
>  statement for FreeBSD is so vague (basically "provide software with no
>  strings attached") that comparing activity with it can't tell you
>  much, if anything, useful.

	Remember, these two items are not necessarily directly connected. 
You could easily have a group of people who are doing all sorts of 
things and everyone is a happy camper, with little or no mission 
statement at all.  OTOH, you could have an excellent and very 
specific mission statement and a group of people who do no real work 
and all they do is bitch and fight all day.

	You might be able to do some research to show that there actually 
is a correlation between these two, but you're going to have to do a 
lot more than just pull that claim out of your hat.  If you want 
anyone to believe you, then you need to substantiate your claim.

	Furthermore, even if you can prove that they are correlated, you 
then have to go further to prove a causal relationship, before you 
can definitively say that the lack of a good mission statement is 
causing all this developer confusion, and therefore we need to have a 
proper mission statement created.

>  Which is precisely why I'm suggesting that FreeBSD would do well to
>  publish one with more substance.

	You're trying to hit escape velocity before you've even shown 
that you can crawl.

	You've got a lot more homework you need to do before you can 
convince us of your claims.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.