When OpenSource ignores it’s power source

OpenSource is about the choice, about the ability to co-create, about the freedome, about the ability to reuse. Every open source project has a chance to decide what parts of the open source thing they want to use.

My story with the Open Source started from Mozilla project around 5 years ago. For the long time it was the only project I was involved in, and it built my vision of open source. I see how Mozilla uses bugzilla to create a common layer for insiders and outsiders to make it easier to join and help, I see and understand the rules of CVS, trees, branches, I see how Mozilla uses the Wiki, LXR, Bonsai. It’s so natural for me. Combined with Devmo it allows to easly learn the project, join it, work inside, share ideas on Wiki, file bugs, solve them, the flaw is really awesome. The only waek point is the lack of reviewers, but Mozilla is aware of the problem and tries to solve it.

In Flock, we’re trying to apply the rules to slightly different project. We’re open source by the heart, but we’re more profit focused by mind. Thanks to great work of Bart, Geoffrey, Chris, Ian, Yosh, Lloyd, Daryl, Manish, and the rest of the crew (through, I brainstormed about our model with the listed folks only), we’re making a great progress in creating our own model that joins the two powers without forcing anyone to feel bad with his believes.

But I’m always suprised meeting the way other open-source project works. Gentoo is still similar to us, Slackware is very one-person focused and hardly web’ed so there’s no that much tools I can use nor the way to influence it progress, or it’s different so much from Mozilla that I didn’t have time to find the way.
But the real shock is every relation with PHP guys. I filed a few bugs, and I always felt offended and abandoned. I filed a bug and there was no response for very long time and I was unable to do anything. I didn’t even know who to contact. Then, someone responded that I’m wrong, and it should work (mis-work?) like this, closed the bug and that’s all…. No place for the discussion, no way to get the info why for example the fact that in some cases some function responds TRUE when it failed to do it’s task is ok for them, nothing. I really don’t get it.

Another example is MediaWiki. If you’ll follow the dates and comments on this bug, and you’re familiar with Mozilla way of driving OpenSource, you’ll be surprised. I was one step from loosing my hope that it’ll every get checked in, but this returned me some hope.
It took them 2 months to check in very small patch. So the bigger one might take much more, right? 🙂
Both patches are live tested, one on Flock wiki, one on MDC. With that trivial patches, the decision to check in should be way faster IMHO. The cost of delay might be that the author who willed to upstream that patch won’t have time to update the patch to the trunk for many months, and the his work will be in vain.

Any predictions about when the second patch could possibly go in? The winner will get a beer 😉