[om-council] Council meeting April 21st follow-up [1]

Bernhard Rosenkraenzer bero at lindev.ch
Fri Apr 22 19:10:54 EDT 2016


On 2016-04-22 14:19, rugyada wrote:
> It has been remarked that we lost around half of manpower.
> Be it really a half, or around the half, I guess nobody can deny we're
> suffering of this hemorrhage.
> 
> May be food for thought.
> 
> Why it's happening?

For the most part, I don't think it's really related to us - most people 
who left simply found other things to do with their lives.
That sort of stuff happens to all projects out there, it just happens to 
hit us worse because if 1 person leaves a project with 100 contributors, 
it matters far less than if 1 person leaves a project with less than 10 
contributors.

At the same time, we haven't been able to pull in many new contributors 
to take their places. I think that's because we're invisible to the 
outside world, and most people don't want to work on something nobody 
uses.

And to make things worse, this sort of thing is a self-amplifying 
problem: We have less manpower, but at the same time people expect us to 
do more and more (this isn't meant as an attack as people who have been 
calling on us to do more - but how can we, despite a small and shrinking 
team, ramp up our efforts and: support another CPU type, keep supporting 
an old release, add another desktop, ...?)
This doesn't exactly help, and being screamed at when saying we won't do 
something doesn't exactly help keep people motivated. (With the 
"screamed at", I'm not talking about people here doing the screaming - 
but some people on mailing lists don't really understand why we won't 
commit to doing some things that they thought made Mandrake great back 
in its days).

ttyl
bero



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