060709 Diego 'Flameeyes' Petten? wrote:
> On Sunday 09 July 2006 01:10, Duncan wrote:
>> An interesting observation was that of all the FLOSS projects,
>> perhaps only Debian had successfully crossed the line
>> from "medium" to "large".
> but they have maintainers that often does not know what their work is
> and screw things up very bad: unstable and experimental they call them.

It's a badly neglected aspect of business studies
that there is an optimal size for any organisation, some bigger than others.

In the area of public transport, our own local TTC performs well
only because it has a tradition of very good management & democratic control.
One reason so much of the British railway system was closed 1955-70
was that the unified nationalised (1948) organisation BR was too big
for its management to keep up with, so they dumped all the local bits.
There have been any number of corporate mergers which went too far.

This is an underlying principle of human behaviour which Gentoo should accept
& never measure success by how big it's getting.  Also it sb very careful
how it integrates new devs: mentoring is much more important than tests.

Another basic human need is to take breaks.  Some recent sudden departures
might have been avoided, if devs took regular vacations as an accepted norm.

The average age for Gentoo devs seems to be about 25 ,
which means there's lots of energy, but a bit too little experience.
As someone who's been around longer than that (smile),
I haven't seen anything seriously wrong with the way Gentoo does things.
Open debate, democratic votes & some basic tolerance solve most problems
& the occasional guy who doesn't fit in can be bidden a friendly goodbye.

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