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Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik
I never said it had to be a design by committee. Go to Sourceforge and check out all the FOSS stuff there. There are tons of highly organized rapidly moving projects there. There's no reason that everyone has to vote on everything in the project. The sensible way to work it would be for FIRST to hire a Linux developer or someone experienced in managing FOSS projects. This person would be in charge of directing the volunteer programmers, organizing the project, and vetting all code to be incorporated into the system.
The whole point of FOSS is to have a really large team working on the project. More eyes on the code means more bugs found faster. I would say that FIRST could just post the source code for the current Hatch system, except that it's quite probably proprietary code that can't legally be opened.
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I was trying to explain that simply telling FIRST "make it open source" is not going to cut it. "More eyes on the code means more bugs found faster" is not necessarily true. What if 90% of the extra people have no clue what they're looking at? You pull 100 well meaning individuals out of a crowd of volunteers and I would bet maybe 20% would be truly able to contribute. Having a large development team is great for a public domain project, but not for something that has been traditionally very guarded. These are things that I would question if I were FIRST.
It sounds like you have given it some thought and are headed in the right direction. You just need to be very specific in stated objectives, processes, and resources if you want to be taken seriously. Venting on CD is one thing, but is anyone willing to actually take the next step and float a proposal to FIRST?