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How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People

Once upon a time, there was an open source project called Subversion, and it needed a new date parser.

One day, a coder came along and wrote one. But he insisted on tagging the source code with his John Hancock. And that was against the rules. Subversion’s founders said that name tags would undermine collaboration.

When the founders asked the coder to remove his name, he refused, threatening to leave the project and take his date parser with him. It was a good date parser – just want the project needed – but the founders stood their ground.

So, the coder left with his parser and never submitted another patch. But six weeks later, a second coder came along. “Hey,” he said, “I can write a date parser.”

Two of Subversion’s founding developers – Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman – believe in open source projects that maintain a large “bus factor.” That would be the number of people who could get run over by a bus before the project collapses. A simple means of maintaining a large bus factor, they say, is banning names from source code.


follows at The Register

Common companies and governmental authorities in Portugal, even most that work with Open Source, didn’t understood a shit about what is F/OSS and that’s why we are not evolving truly as you can read here.

Last year, Fitz and Collins-Sussman gave a similar talk at Google’s Mountain View headquarters. You’ll find a video here and slides here.

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