No subject

painlessly true;  each person involved has his/her own goals;

Jesse is trying to make RT2 as stable and useful as RT1,
regardless of how long it takes and how many deadlines slip.
RT is his baby and he has the right to nurse the project until
he deems it fit for release.  I think and most of you will
probably agree that this is the "right" way to develop software.
I admire him for this.

Tobix, on the other hand, is responsible for customizing 
and maintaining rt at FunCom, and has dedicated countless hours
of his time to the project, in all areas.  He is a practical,
hardworking person with a job to do and internal deadlines to meet,
promises to keep.

I personally am in a similiar situation as Tobix (i think :).
I've installed RT1 at my current place of employment, and  
everyone is satisfied with the the current product, but
there are a number of feature requests which have been made
by the management/employees that would improve everybodys
satisfaction with the product.  Mostly minor changes, but
important changes (to us) nonetheless.  

These features are promised in RT2, but if i can't
deliver them sooner than that deadline, there is the
chance that we'l be forced to 'upgrade' to an 
obscenely priced, closed source commercial system,
in which case my employer will not pay me to work
on RT , and RT looses a supporter. .

While i can understand the positions of both parties,
I'm more sympathetic to Tobix's perspective.  Projects mature 
more quickly in the wild than they do in a sterile environment.  
(ALA The Cathedral and the Bazaar , though it pains me to reference ESR;)
You can not deliver a project early without bugs,  and its
easier to find the bugs and shortcomings from user feedback.

Where would Linux be if Linus was still in his basement
hacking assembly, waiting for the day when the kernel
was perfect?  NT would be dominant , and RMS still
would not have a workable release of HURD out the door..

For the meanwhile I'll be backing the sourceforge project.


regards,


_Michael


--
Michael Jastremski                      Chief Pickle
Keeper of Systems.                      Megaglobal Corp
Liquidation.com                         http://megaglobal.com
http://liquidation.com                  http://westphila.net/mike



PS:

If you're going to use Xemacs as an example, I'd like to point
out that Xemacs would not exist at all were it not for the 
code fork.  Despite the demand, RMS certainly wasnt going
to produce Xemacs.  It is also important to note that RMS
can no longer type due to his do-it-all-yourself attitude.
Enough said.