Bounties and the GIMP 2
December 1, 2005 2:24 pm gimpSven wrote a response to my analysis of a GIMP bounty in my blog.
From the point on that Daniel dissapeared, the bounties have been dead and there was nothing that we could have done about that. Your summary puts it like there would have been an offer on the table all the time. But there wasn’t. There was a deal between Mark and Daniel and that deal had failed. It would have been wrong to assume that there was still a valid offer at this point. Without clearly defined milestones, there are no bounties.
I disagree with that, since plainly, Mark considered the bounties were offered to the project, and weren’t a deal between himself and Daniel. In addition, for the 18 months between when the bounty was proposed and was pulled, to my knowledge, Sven didn’t send an email to Mark asking him about the bounties. I think a little more communication could have cleared up a lot of questions much earlier.
My biggest regret in the whole affair is that we could have announced the offer far & wide, and had maybe some new contributors, but because of this single perception that the bounties were somehow “a deal between Mark and Daniel”, a great opportunity went to waste.
December 2nd, 2005 at 1:02 am
Sorry, but where exactly did an opportunity go to waste here? As fas as I know, the offer to fund this development is still as valid as it used to be earlier this year. It’s just a question of making up our minds on a couple of things. Do we consider bounties useful at all? If so, what do we want to use them for? Who is going to make up the rules and who is going to decide if they are obeyed?
As far as I am concerned, I still need to be convinced that bounties would help with GEGL development. Daniel and Mark tried this and I consider this experiment failed. The difficult part here is not writing the code, it is designing the library and API. If we were past that point, we could consider proclaiming bounties for an implementation. But we can hardly use bounties for the design process and that’s why I think that money isn’t going to help here. At least not at this point.
A little more communication might have been a good thing but it would not have changed anything. Not unless we have a well-defined TODO for GEGL. Pippin, Mitch and me spend some time this summer to get us closer to this point. And I think that this effort was a well spent. A little more of this and we might actually get things moving again. Money isn’t going to make that happen.
December 2nd, 2005 at 3:13 am
I think that Dave is right regarding the fact that many GIMP folks (I was among them) perceived the bounties as “a deal between Mark and Daniel”. For a while, I even considered the whole GEGL to be Daniel’s private turf until it became clear that Daniel was gone.
At that point in time, it could have been useful to spread the word about the bounty and check if anyone would be interested, instead of just remaining silent. On the other hand, I agree with Sven that it probably wouldn’t have changed much. Unless…
A good software architect could have replied to the offer and worked on the design an implementation of GEGL. This is not a very likely scenario, but it could have happened.
December 2nd, 2005 at 3:58 am
I really wasn’t annoyed when I wrote that article first. I felt it was important to admit when we (collectively) fucked something up, so that we can tryu to learn from our mistakes.
Sven, the fact that you’re now denying there was ever a fuck-up is plain ridiculous.
“As fas as I know, the offer to fund this development is still as valid as it used to be earlier this year”, you said. What part of “I am withdrawing the bounty offers” did you not understand?
You’ve said that it was a deal between Mark & Daniel. Did you ask? You’ve said a little more communication would not have changed anything. You’re wrong. Even now, you’re speaking to the intent of Mark Shuttleworth in proposing bounties – have you sent him a mail?
December 6th, 2005 at 12:49 am
Dave, what’s up with you? You know very well that Mark’s offer was bound to a particular set of milestones, which was a deal between Mark and Dave. He has withdrawn these bounties but told us that he’d be willing to talk to us again if we can come up with a plan for GEGL including a list of milestones suitable for turning them into bounties. That puts us pretty much into the situation we’ve been to before. If there’s something that’s been fucked up, then it’s the lack of a clear TODO for GEGL and it’s integration into GIMP. There’s something we can do about that. Pointing at each other for not writing pointless mails is not part of it though.
BTW, next time you want to bring up such topics, why don’t you use a public mailing-list instead?