kudos and observation

[Neil W. Van Dyke]

I appreciate all the work that the developers have been putting into
Guile, especially in the last year or so.

The work that must be done is not as glamorous as it was when RMS first
announced the Guile project.  The current developers also have the
burden of numerous legacy compatibility issues.  This makes their
persistence all the more admirable, and 1.6 will be a huge improvement
over 1.4.

I'd like to vocalize an observation I suspect many people have had...

But first, a quick story: Last week, a friend who is an especially
productive contributor to the CL free-software community expressed
frustration with the latest round of flamewars there, and half-jokingly
asked about converting to Scheme.  I reminded him of Guile, and he went
to skim the Guile email lists for not the first time.  He quickly
decided that Guile still had its own suboptimal organizational issues,
and his interest in CL was renewed.

My observation, as a relative outsider to Guile, is that not all the
people who are doing the bulk of the work on Guile are having a
proportionate say in Guile's direction.

Lack of say is a disempowerment of programmers, and, once there is the
inevitable disagreement on points that the disempowered programmers care
about, this creates morale problems.  All of which seems antithetical to
the spirit of free software.

The "chief programmer" organizational model for development teams can
sometimes work well.  But, if that's the model the Guile developers are
trying to use, there's morale evidence that it's not working perfectly.
Given Guile's sometimes pained history, it seems all the more important
to encourage the people who are enthusiastic about contributing to
Guile, and to make sure that everyone is working together well.

-- 
                                                        Neil W. Van Dyke
                                             http://www.neilvandyke.org/