Re: [K12OSN] The harvest is ready, but the workers are few...

[Eric Harrison <eharrison mail mesd k12 or us>]

On Fri, 30 Jan 2004, Quentin Hartman wrote:
<snip>
>	Jim didn't outright say it in a response to my thread earlier today,
>but implied that "people who aren't working to make the project go
>shouldn't talk about what the project should do". Please straighten me
>out if that was not what was meant, but that sort of attitude really
>irritates me, and I have seen it in a lot of places in my wandering
>through the OSS communities. Discounting someone's input to a project
>simply because they are not technically adept enough to execute their
>ideas is great way to overlook good ideas that a developer might miss.
<snip>

Hey Quentin, I'm pretty sure you miss-read the post. (for the record,
I know both Quentin and Jim personally, so I read more into these posts
than most people will). I'm not going to try to analyze these posts,
instead I will express my views on the general subject.

My "value-add" to the K12LTSP is refining and combining the fine work
of others. It is hard, grueling work to make such matters appear to
be simple. Once hard problems are made obvious, it is often trivial
to integrate back upstream.


For the "big stuff", such as coming up with a reasonable way to have
a single utility that can be used to configure arbitrary distributions
to work with LTSP, Jim rocks. There is a near-zero chance that I could
have done what he has accomplished.

If you want to work on the heavy stuff, such as making LTSP easy to 
install on arbitrary systems, such efforts are better spent on ltsp-devel.

If you want to take the LTSP work and make it work well for a typical
school teacher, this is the right place.

We should focus on what we do well, and do it where it does the most
good.


The short-short version of the history of K12LTSP reads like this:

* Jim comes up with a brillant idea, has working code
* Paul sees the brilliance in Jim's ideas, but does not know how to 
  apply them to solve his specific needs
* Eric gets wedged in the middle, bridges the gap between Jim and Paul.

As the ideas from those who develop LTSP and those who use K12LTSP flow
back and forth, creating a feedback loop, the gap between the two groups
narrows. This is a good thing for everyone, especially Eric since it
reduces the amount of work he has to do and he still gets some of the
credit ;-)

-Eric