[Opensim-dev] Cathedral 0, Bazaar 1

[Morgaine]

The recent thread about "Leaving Opensim" highlights that not everyone has
yet absorbed the impact of recent changes in SCM.

While it's true that the Opensim Core group still operates partly as a
Cathedral (because they anoint *people* to join them, instead of picking
code contributions on the merits of the code), the project's SCM moved from
SVN to Git a little while ago, and this brings about a profound change.
It's not merely a different SCM tool, but a change from centralized to
distributed code management, and this brings Opensim almost entirely into
the Bazaar model.  (Non-programmers may want to see
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/<http://www.catb.org/%7Eesr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/>
if this is new.)

With Git, everyone's repository for the project has equal standing, and
anyone can clone their own repository, make changes, and advertise their
improvements.  Approval by the Core team is not required, and nothing
important distinguishes Opensim Core's own repository from any other.  The
system is truly distributed.

As a result, there is no need for anyone to "leave Opensim" owing to
divergence of views or direction.  Just clone your own repo and let people
know about it.  If your contributions are useful, people will merge your
changes into their own clones of the Core repo, or will follow your branch,
or will clone your own repo wholesale.  It's like old-fashioned forking but
without the hassles of forking, and with much reduced chasing of tail
lights. ;-)

In time, I expect that the Opensim Core developer group will be replaced by
a Steering Group, perhaps once version 1.0 has been reached and a public
Opensim Foundation has been created.  The steering group could select and
test well-regarded public contributions from a large number of community
developer Git repositories, picked on the basis of consistency and community
needs.  Then the Bazaar will truly have arrived.

But we're almost there anyway, because the tools already allow it.  There is
no need to leave, just join the Git bazaar. :-)

Morgaine.
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