OpenUru.org, The Guild of Writers, Forks, And You

JWPlatt · **Posted:** Wed Jun 01, 2011 1:34 pm

Note: I was going to post this solely as response to Stucuk and Branan in the Perception is Everything thread but it is an Off Topic thread and, once written, I felt the post was more worthy than getting lost there.

Please keep any discussion here limited to positive messages of encouragement and offers of help and participation. All else discordant or snarky is given my request to mods to remove.

PaladinOfKaos wrote:

Stucuk wrote:

Any chance of OpenURU and GoW working together on one Fork?

We've discussed merging our changes with them, but their admin has been *extremely* slow at answering our questions and giving us his concerns and questions with the our suggestions. The ball is in their court.

True. And it will be addressed.

@Stucuk: Forks are natural in open source projects. They're expected. And they can be to your advantage by allowing different intimate groups to work together their own way, but to bring forth new ideas and better code to be integrated later. Forks are okay. They don't mean people don't get along. They do mean there is healthy and diverse activity. If there is something you (the community, collectively) want done that is not getting done by the GoW or OpenUru.org, feel free to open your own fork; start your own projects. It's better than waiting, and your work can still get used by anyone. This community stress over the GoW fork is, dare I say it, the community's own "Manufactured Division" (see my sig graphic) perpetuated by the false belief that forks are bad. This external focus on forks or some phantom rivalry rather than an internal "how do I contribute" doesn't do the community any favors. Everyone can chill; it's okay.

@Branan: It's not up to the admin. The admin only keeps the site going. The team at OpenUru.org worked intensely on getting open source to you and the community for about four months before release. We are now doing our best to catch up with real life priorities, much as students do during term exams, except term exams go on all year long for many of us. I am currently working on a project for Creative Kingdoms that takes all my time except that which I can afford to give to my family. rarified, our Foundry manager, is currently traveling in the northeast US. a'moaca' and cjkelly completed the release of MOSS concurrently with CWE and a'moaca' is supporting it as needed. Mac_Fife has been diligent in keeping contact alive both as mod on these forums and team member at OpenUru.org. He greatly deserves and needs some time off too. Cyan (i.e. Chogon) is heavily into mobile game project development. If we are not responsive, it is not because we are disinterested or shunning you. It is because there are matters of livelihood and family more important than Uru.

That leaves... who? The community. There is the misperception and expectation that OpenUru.org is a development house. It is not. It is a project site committed to the support of Open Uru. The GoW folks can do all the development if they wish. We need them. But frankly, I think the scope and potential of this project is orders of magnitude bigger than a few core developers and they probably would appreciate much more help from the community than they are getting right now. I hope many more developers from inside and outside arrive to help. We need to find them, invite them, and give them a friendly place to work.

The team at OpenUru.org completed its years-long mission to help Cyan Worlds bring open source to you. We released the code and included the entire community as quickly as possible so it could take a role in deciding for itself how best to proceed rather than get everything perfect up front. The mission at OpenUru.org now is to support and facilitate community development. We cannot, and will not, do it alone.

Community participation is critical to the sustained success of this long term project. There is an imperative that people should be called upon to get involved and participate. This is not our project. It is yours; everyone's. It can only work with more people getting involved, being committed, and taking positions of responsibility and leadership.

Stucuk · **Joined:** Sun Jun 27, 2010 1:41 am **Posts:** 216

JWPlatt wrote:

perpetuated by the false belief that forks are bad

They are bad if nothing gets filtered back to Cyan.

JWPlatt wrote:

This is not our project. It is yours; everyone's.

That philosophy doesn't work. You need clear leadership and goals for large community projects to operate effectively.

JWPlatt wrote:

We cannot, and will not, do it alone.

GoW seems to be willing to work with you. So your only alone as long as talks are unresolved.

Nye_Sigismund · **Posted:** Wed Jun 01, 2011 3:55 pm

Stucuk wrote:

JWPlatt wrote:

perpetuated by the false belief that forks are bad

They are bad if nothing gets filtered back to Cyan.

Agreed, and at the moment that's not happening. fiery abyss, the GoW's fork doesn't appear to be registering any activity at the moment - I assume this is because it's all hands on deck for PyPRP2.

EDIT: Oh hey, I spoke too soon. Just checked now and it looks like development's woken up over there. Sorry!
(Gotta love Github's network screen, lovely functionality.)

Quote:

JWPlatt wrote:

This is not our project. It is yours; everyone's.

That philosophy doesn't work. You need clear leadership and goals for large community projects to operate effectively.

I think leadership depends. For OSCAR, I'm "leading" in so much as making sure that the lights are on and development gets done. Goals, though, I agree with. The community as a whole isn't able to decide firmly on a goal, which is why with OSCAR I decided to make sure it had a definite mission statement before I launched it.

OU are not there for leadership, though, they're there to facilitate other people - like the GoW, should the GoW have chosen to more closely work with the OU repo. I think that's a sensible idea, and I at least am trying to utilise their platform.

Quote:

JWPlatt wrote:

We cannot, and will not, do it alone.

GoW seems to be willing to work with you. So your only alone as long as talks are unresolved.

I'm not going to get drawn into this. Politics makes everyone angry and is about as helpful to actual development as sawing your arms off and replacing them with keyboards.

PaladinOfKaos · **Joined:** Thu Aug 03, 2006 10:55 pm **Posts:** 625

JWPlatt wrote:

If we are not responsive, it is not because we are disinterested or shunning you. It is because there are matters of livelihood and family more important than Uru.

I'm going to address this first, because I think it's extremely important. I feel quite strongly that if the people in your team didn't have the time and energy to deal with code maintainership and developer interaction, then you needed to either look for help before the release so you could have a proper maintainer, or tell Cyan "Thanks, but I don't think we can handle this right now" so that another team in the community who does have the time and energy could handle it.

JWPlatt wrote:

Community participation is critical to the sustained success of this long term project. There is an imperative that people should be called upon to get involved and participate. This is not our project. It is yours; everyone's. It can only work with more people getting involved, being committed, and taking positions of responsibility and leadership.

This is the other big one. I believe you're being honest when you say this, but many of the other OU team seem to have very strong opinions about how things should be done with the CWE repo. My suggestions and input were not taken very well. If you truly want an outsider to take a leadership position, then you'll need to convince a'moaca' and rarified to back off when someone tries to come in and offer suggestions. If they're going to shoot ideas down, then they should just implement what they've got in their heads. To me it feels "waiting for community involvement" really means "waiting for more people to come agree with us".

JWPlatt wrote:

It's not up to the admin. The admin only keeps the site going.

Given the lack of a proper maintainer, the repository admin seems to be the only good contact. He's also the one that stepped up and joined the discussion about merging things. My previous points all apply here, of course.

Christian Walther · **Posted:** Wed Jun 01, 2011 7:56 pm

Agreed, the problem is not that there is a fork. That’s inevitable anyway, and we would be nowhere near the huge amount of progress made in the GoW fork if those developers hadn’t gone ahead at their own pace. (On the other hand, while going ahead fast in a small group without too much concern about involving outsiders has its advantages, I think trying to explain what one does to the greater community and only going ahead after some kind of public review, as I’m trying to do in a small example here, would be beneficial for enlarging the developer community and gaining the support of the player community. It does slow things down, but for people with limited spare time that’s not necessarily a bad thing.)

The problem is that some mistakes were made in the forking that make sharing work between the forks more difficult than it should be. But I’m not here to dwell on them, I’m here to overcome them. Coincidentally, I was planning to update my latest proposal and garner feedback on it from the H-uru devs tonight (and now I’m being delayed by writing this

).

As for the slowness of the OpenUru.org staff, while I completely understand that, the problem with it is that currently very few people have commit access to the OpenUru.org CWE repository. Even if access were given to more people, they probably wouldn’t want to make any far-reaching decisions without consulting with the core staff that made it all happen to begin with. So, as long as those people are slow (and again, there’s nothing wrong with that, there are completely justified reasons for being slow), progress on OpenUru.org will be slow. I don’t see a way how community involvement could change that at this point. The only way of making faster progress is to declare oneself independent of the slow people, and that is what the GoW developers have done. If OpenUru.org wants to be a center of CWE development, that will somehow have to change.

An important point in that regard seems to me that there should be a public statement from Cyan on what the best way is of increasing the chances of getting one’s contributions into MOULa. This is something that I assume many, outside of those who are completely disgruntled with Cyan, are interested in – I certainly am. If anyone had asked me that question two months ago, I would have answered “don’t bother, the chance is zero anyway, Cyan doesn’t have the manpower to do such things”. But MOULa build 902 has proven me wrong on that. In the past it seems that sending patches directly to Chogon was the most successful strategy, but that’s hardly a sustainable model for the future, or he’d be inundated with patches. So a reasonable assumption is that Cyan is probably following the OpenUru.org CWE repository and having one’s contributions in there, reviewed and tested, gives them the best (if still small) chances of eventually getting picked up. It is this assumption that I think is what’s keeping the OpenUru.org CWE repository from falling into complete irrelevance right now. Unfortunately, with the usual silence from Cyan, it is a weak and unconfirmed assumption.

cjkelly1 · **Joined:** Tue May 09, 2006 7:48 pm **Posts:** 100

PaladinOfKaos wrote:

My suggestions and input were not taken very well. If you truly want an outsider to take a leadership position, then you'll need to convince a'moaca', cjkelly, and rarified to back off when someone tries to come in and offer suggestions. If they're going to shoot ideas down, then they should just implement what they've got in their heads.

Hmmmm. What did I do? I have reviewed my posts on OpenUru, and I do not see anything even remotely recent where I shot down suggestions. I am not a professional developer, so have not weighed in on the repository and site thing, and I am not intending to do so, because I lack the expertise to comment.

On a side note, I shall answer a sort-of question.

lunanne wrote:

when I try to link to the repository I suddenly need an account.

No account is required to pull source from the OpenUru repository. Just use:

username = guest
password = guest

PaladinOfKaos · **Joined:** Thu Aug 03, 2006 10:55 pm **Posts:** 625

cjkelly1 wrote:

PaladinOfKaos wrote:

My suggestions and input were not taken very well. If you truly want an outsider to take a leadership position, then you'll need to convince a'moaca', cjkelly, and rarified to back off when someone tries to come in and offer suggestions. If they're going to shoot ideas down, then they should just implement what they've got in their heads.

Hmmmm. What did I do? I have reviewed my posts on OpenUru, and I do not see anything even remotely recent where I shot down suggestions. I am not a professional developer, so have not weighed in on the repository and site thing, and I am not intending to do so, because I lack the expertise to comment.

You are correct. After reviewing all the discussions that I recall participating in over at OU, I can't find any posts by you. I apologize. For some reason your name was sticking in my head, but I guess that's just because you're one of the few who have actually comitted code to the OU repo. My post has been edited to remove you from the list.

Marten · **Posted:** Thu Jun 02, 2011 1:47 am

PaladinOfKaos wrote:

I feel quite strongly that if the people in your [OU] team didn't have the time and energy to deal with code maintainership and developer interaction, then you needed to either look for help before the release so you could have a proper maintainer, or tell Cyan "Thanks, but I don't think we can handle this right now" so that another team in the community who does have the time and energy could handle it.

I have limited time to contribute to this thread so I'm cherry-picking this one comment. After all, Branan did say it was the extremely important part.

There seems to be an assumption in the above response that the OU team knew in advance, or should've known, that they wouldn't "have the time and energy" to do certain necessary things. Well, I've committed to projects before myself and then found out later, when neck deep in them, that unexpected priorities were taking control. So, I think presuming what OU knew or should have known is a bit unfair.

There might be some utility to understanding what went off-track or failed to happen with the OU release, so that similar mistakes can be avoided in the future, but I'm not sure how much of this situation can or ever will repeat. That's very different from throwing accusations or giving advice in the past tense (i.e., "you needed to" or "you should have"). What's done is done and cannot be changed. Let's instead identify what can be done to make things better.

Here are some things that need to be done. Most of it - though not all - is in OU's proverbial court.

OU must break out of the catch-22 where they need the community to step up and volunteer, but (based on my perception) don't seem to have the bandwidth to accept the community stepping up and volunteering. OU also needs to be more specific about what needs to be done, rather than "we need developers and we need leaders" (which is the most specificity I saw in JW's opening post). In my experience, general calls for volunteers do not work. You'll have greater success if you first define what needs to be done, then recruit people who can do those things.

OU should look to the GoW and grey hats as great sources of information, based on their own experiences, on what some of those things-that-need-to-be-done are. Branan has previously stepped up over at OU with a starting list, "Getting the Ball Rolling." And in the quote above, there's another requirement: You need the maintainer position to be staffed full time. It doesn't matter if you have someone who's maintainer most of the time already. If that person's busy, then you need another person - a backup, a delegate.

Branan mentioned some difficulty in making suggestions to OU - that it seemed to him that others had already mentally worked out how they wanted things to be done, but that no work was in place. Here's my perspective: I will usually accept a working solution over a non-existent "better" solution - particularly if that better solution has no clear timeline for implementation. If there's a need, and OU doesn't like suggestions on how to resolve it, then OU needs to be responsibly responsive to the need or be willing to compromise or leverage a temporary solution.

On the flip side of that coin, persons who make suggestions should not take offense if their ideas are not always implemented as envisioned, as long as something is being done to address the identified need. Have a little more patience with the OU folks when they don't like an idea. Look for solutions that meet everyone's needs, or compromise.

As a final point, I'm going to loop back to where I started. I know about "matters of livelyhood and family." And I know that Myst Online is a game. But, I also know the importance of fulfilling a commitment. I don't agree entirely with JW's perspective of "The team at OpenUru.org completed its years-long mission to help Cyan Worlds bring open source to you." That's like saying "NASA has completed its years-long mission to launch a rocket." When the ship has just flown into space, the mission isn't complete. It's just started. The OpenUru team has committed to activity beyond the source release... they can't just say "OK community, c'mon in, now it's your turn to steer while we're patting ourselves on the back and taking a well deserved break." The community didn't make the commitment. The OU team did. Continue to drive the ship until you have others to help.

PS: Branan - still waiting on a reply to my last PM.

Lontahv · **Joined:** Sat Apr 14, 2007 9:51 pm **Posts:** 265

cjkelly1 wrote:

lunanne wrote:

when I try to link to the repository I suddenly need an account.

No account is required to pull source from the OpenUru repository. Just use:

username = guest
password = guest

How are we supposed to just know that information if we just stumble upon the repository?
This doesn't seem like OpenUru to me but rather DoorClosedButNotCompletelyLockedUru. Look at the Huru and libHSPlasma repositories:
https://github.com/H-uru
http://dev.zrax.net/hg/libhsplasma/

Look at the PyPRP2 repository:
http://dev.zrax.net/hg/pyprp2/

What do you see? You don't see a login box, you see progress, commits, code, and you can casually clone yourself the repository and start playing around. Now that is what I would call the true essence of Open Source.

Tai'lahr · **Posted:** Thu Jun 02, 2011 8:32 pm

Hey Jaydubya, I thought this was a great post and I know it took a chunk of time you really can't afford right now to write it. So, I think it would be a shame if people didn't read with an open mind and take away from it the same thing I did, so I whittled it down to a Reader's Digest version (that's old folk slang for "tl:dr" :wink:

) with just the highlights I liked best.

JWPlatt wrote:

Please keep any discussion here limited to positive messages of encouragement and offers of help and participation.

Forks are natural in open source projects. ... They mean there is healthy and diverse activity. ... This external focus on forks or some phantom rivalry rather than an internal "how do I contribute" doesn't do the community any favors.

If we are not responsive, it is not because we are disinterested or shunning you. It is because there are matters of livelihood and family more important than Uru.

... There is the misperception and expectation that OpenUru.org is a development house. It is not. It is a project site committed to the support of Open Uru. The GoW folks can do all the development if they wish. We need them. But frankly, I think the scope and potential of this project is orders of magnitude bigger than a few core developers and they probably would appreciate much more help from the community than they are getting right now. I hope many more developers from inside and outside arrive to help. We need to find them, invite them, and give them a friendly place to work.

The mission at OpenUru.org now is to support and facilitate community development. We cannot, and will not, do it alone.

Community participation is critical to the sustained success of this long term project. There is an imperative that people should be called upon to get involved and participate. This is not our project. It is yours; everyone's. It can only work with more people getting involved, being committed, and taking positions of responsibility and leadership.

Thanks again to you and your team for all your hard work these past few years and especially in recent months.

And, in the interest of equal time, kudos to the GoW developers for all their hard work on their own fork as well as all the programming work they've done to benefit the Uru community since (Uru) time began.

May Yahvo reward each and every individual for their contributions to the Uru community.

cjkelly1 · **Joined:** Tue May 09, 2006 7:48 pm **Posts:** 100

Lontahv wrote:

cjkelly1 wrote:

lunanne wrote:

when I try to link to the repository I suddenly need an account.

No account is required to pull source from the OpenUru repository. Just use:

username = guest
password = guest

How are we supposed to just know that information if we just stumble upon the repository?

I am not intending nor desiring to get in on the fray. I was merely trying to help out and answer the question.

Marten · **Posted:** Tue Jun 07, 2011 8:13 pm

I appreciate your input cjkelly1, and I hope the information you posted helps others.

Can the repository you're using be configured for read-only access without requiring credentials of any kind? I think that would be a vast improvement.

I know, and perhaps you know as well, that guest/guest has been traditionally used for anonymous access to systems since the earliest need arose on the internet with FTP sites. Yet that harkens to a much earlier time when a standard username/password combination was an acceptable workaround to the design of FTP that didn't allow for account-less access. I think the standards today are a bit different, and the best solutions shouldn't require any user documentation or special knowledge.

cjkelly1 · **Joined:** Tue May 09, 2006 7:48 pm **Posts:** 100

Marten wrote:

ICan the repository you're using be configured for read-only access without requiring credentials of any kind? I think that would be a vast improvement.

Mercurial does allow anonymous access with no login needed, but I do not know how it is set up on OU, and cannot change it, as I do not manage that system. It could be that the reason a login box pops up is due to the integration with all the other tools, but this is simply a guess.

I have added the credentials to the OU wiki, but I do not have access to the web pages. I have sent a note to the web page maintainer asking him to add these to the page as well, when he has a moment. This does not address the root complaint (which is quite valid, as people do not always arrive via wiki or web page), but hopefully it helps a little bit.

Lontahv · **Joined:** Sat Apr 14, 2007 9:51 pm **Posts:** 265

cjkelly1, thank you for acknowledging the issue. The problem being fixable, I'm sure it can be resolved when the repository system manager realizes a problem exists and gets around to fixing it.

OpenUru.org, The Guild of Writers, Forks, And You

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