Old habits and processes die hard. While we’re working with open source (which is quite exceptional for a product) there’s still a long way to working like open source. Yes you can see the commits going into the repository, but the whole shebang is driven by internal processes using internal requirements, internal design documents, internal bugzilla, etc.
When you have a process that kind of works already, it’s hard to change to something new. We’re looking into making more technical documentation available after updating them and removing all naughty words first. Personally I’d like to see more planning and everything done in the open beforehand rather than after the IT-2006 release has been made, but that would be clashing with current policies. And we’re not entirely organized to truly handle outside involvement in bugzilla and mailing lists, it’s rather ad-hoc currently but we’re doing what we can.
Hope we get things sorted out sooner rather than later. I’m sure there are lots of areas where everyone would benefit from having more transparent processes. Especially comes to mind the Application Installer and what 3rd party applications can and can not do without resorting to binary patching framework components.
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