User:Bernie: Difference between revisions

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e-mail: bernie AT laptop DOT org
e-mail: bernie AT laptop DOT org


Home page: http://www.codewiz.org/
Personal homepage: http://www.codewiz.org/

My OLPC projects: http://www.codewiz.org/wiki/OneLaptopPerChild


== Why we should be more open ==

Openness will be our greatest and most lasting strength. If we shy away
from it now it will never return.
-- [[Samuel Klein]]

"We should be more open" may strike many as a surprising suggestion
for OLPC, since it's already supposed to be one of the most open
projects out there.

But opening just the source without opening the rest of the
development process is a recurring pitfall in which even
large corporates such as RedHat and Sun all fell, initially.
I see us likely to fall into the same circular thinking that
"trying to involve external contributors does not pay off
because so far we've got so little external contributions".

And I've heard the argument that "working on our platform would
be too hard for outside contributors". This can't possibly be
true: projects like OpenWRT and the Linux kernel and dozens of
RTOS projects out there regularly attract flocks of hackers who
are very capable of working on all kinds of fancy and undocumented
hardware and exotic OSes, with great results.

My access point can now play MP3s :-)

Revision as of 02:54, 13 December 2007

Volunteer at OLPC. Hacking on X, base OS, kernel and i18n.

e-mail: bernie AT laptop DOT org

Personal homepage: http://www.codewiz.org/

My OLPC projects: http://www.codewiz.org/wiki/OneLaptopPerChild


Why we should be more open

Openness will be our greatest and most lasting strength.  If we shy away
from it now it will never return.
 -- Samuel Klein

"We should be more open" may strike many as a surprising suggestion for OLPC, since it's already supposed to be one of the most open projects out there.

But opening just the source without opening the rest of the development process is a recurring pitfall in which even large corporates such as RedHat and Sun all fell, initially. I see us likely to fall into the same circular thinking that "trying to involve external contributors does not pay off because so far we've got so little external contributions".

And I've heard the argument that "working on our platform would be too hard for outside contributors". This can't possibly be true: projects like OpenWRT and the Linux kernel and dozens of RTOS projects out there regularly attract flocks of hackers who are very capable of working on all kinds of fancy and undocumented hardware and exotic OSes, with great results.

My access point can now play MP3s :-)