the end result will not be that project having a large pool of only experienced developers, while interested people who don't quite match the appropriate experience level go off, educate themselves, and return when they're qualified enough to match the project's requirements.
... I have to say, there are a few, very small, very magical and privileged contexts in which this does in fact hold true. I live in one of them; Cambridge UK, otherwise known as Silicon Fen. The guy you can't see who lives in the next bedroom over <---- there is a hardcore cryptography programmer; he got his current job on the strength of having written a crypto library for kicks. He is the kind of person who sees a project he wants to contribute to, goes away, self-educates, and then comes back and dives into the fray. He gets a lot of respect, and with good reason, because he's damn good at what he does.
He's also a member of a tiny, tiny minority of people I've met, mostly but by no means exclusively male, who actually work like this. Over the dozen years I've been in Cambridge, in and out of various parts of the high tech business world, I've learnt that the true geek is a very particular kind of person, and thinks in a very particular way, and I think the open source culture that puts such stumbling blocks in the beginner's way evolved out of the group interactions of people who, actually, really are that awesome. I quite clearly remember learning a whole new idiom and system of reference when I first started hanging around with programmers; I'm an author by trade and my first degree was in foreign languages, so you might say I'm something of a professional communicator, and it was fascinating to immerse myself in that and learn the world in a different way. In fact, I've devoted quite some time over the years to studying the language and culture that naturally springs up among the geeks who are my partners and my friends.
And at the end of twelve years doing that, what I've concluded is this: the open source community as it stands is pretty much composed entirely of maverick geniuses, who manage by hook or by crook to work together. Because they're maverick geniuses, working together for them happens in a very quirky way, and that's what's given rise to the open source culture as it stands. I think part of the "open source attitude problem" (insofar as it's a problem rather than just a deep failure to communicate) is actually a question of the classic geek assumption that "everyone else is like me". The problem is that with open source, the people making that assumption are almost all people who have the genius factor. They're the gifted few who have that instinctive flair for the task at hand; a natural love of and aptitude for hacking that makes it second nature to work both by and for yourself. Most of the rest of us aren't so lucky, even if we're bright and able enough that we're perfectly capable of competent hacking given training in the basics. I think getting that point across might do a lot to stop this debate polarising too hard...
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... I have to say, there are a few, very small, very magical and privileged contexts in which this does in fact hold true. I live in one of them; Cambridge UK, otherwise known as Silicon Fen. The guy you can't see who lives in the next bedroom over <---- there is a hardcore cryptography programmer; he got his current job on the strength of having written a crypto library for kicks. He is the kind of person who sees a project he wants to contribute to, goes away, self-educates, and then comes back and dives into the fray. He gets a lot of respect, and with good reason, because he's damn good at what he does.
He's also a member of a tiny, tiny minority of people I've met, mostly but by no means exclusively male, who actually work like this. Over the dozen years I've been in Cambridge, in and out of various parts of the high tech business world, I've learnt that the true geek is a very particular kind of person, and thinks in a very particular way, and I think the open source culture that puts such stumbling blocks in the beginner's way evolved out of the group interactions of people who, actually, really are that awesome. I quite clearly remember learning a whole new idiom and system of reference when I first started hanging around with programmers; I'm an author by trade and my first degree was in foreign languages, so you might say I'm something of a professional communicator, and it was fascinating to immerse myself in that and learn the world in a different way. In fact, I've devoted quite some time over the years to studying the language and culture that naturally springs up among the geeks who are my partners and my friends.
And at the end of twelve years doing that, what I've concluded is this: the open source community as it stands is pretty much composed entirely of maverick geniuses, who manage by hook or by crook to work together. Because they're maverick geniuses, working together for them happens in a very quirky way, and that's what's given rise to the open source culture as it stands. I think part of the "open source attitude problem" (insofar as it's a problem rather than just a deep failure to communicate) is actually a question of the classic geek assumption that "everyone else is like me". The problem is that with open source, the people making that assumption are almost all people who have the genius factor. They're the gifted few who have that instinctive flair for the task at hand; a natural love of and aptitude for hacking that makes it second nature to work both by and for yourself. Most of the rest of us aren't so lucky, even if we're bright and able enough that we're perfectly capable of competent hacking given training in the basics. I think getting that point across might do a lot to stop this debate polarising too hard...