标题: The Cathedral and the Bazaar (3)——The Importance of Having Users 用户的重要性 [打印本页] 作者: flong19900501 时间: 2011-07-02 01:40 标题: The Cathedral and the Bazaar (3)——The Importance of Having Users 用户的重要性 http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_746638070100tf4t.html
And so I inherited popclient. Just as importantly, I inherited popclient's user base. Users are wonderful things to have, and not just because they demonstrate that you're serving a need, that you've done something right. Properly cultivated, they can become co-developers.
Another strength of the Unix tradition, one that Linux pushes to a happy extreme, is that a lot of users are hackers too. Because source code is available, they can be effective hackers. This can be tremendously useful for shortening debugging time. Given a bit of encouragement, your users will diagnose problems, suggest fixes, and help improve the code far more quickly than you could
unaided.
6.Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
把你的用户当作你的协助开发者是加速代码改进和高效调试的最简单的一种方式。
The power of this effect is easy to underestimate. In fact, pretty well all of us in the open-source world drastically underestimated how well it would scale up with number of users and against system complexity, until Linus Torvalds showed us differently.
In fact, I think Linus's cleverest and most consequential hack was not the construction of the Linux kernel itself, but rather his invention of the Linux development model. When I expressed this opinion in his presence once, he smiled and quietly repeated something he has often said: ``I'm basically a very lazy person who likes to get credit for things other people actually do.'' Lazy like a fox. Or, as Robert Heinlein famously wrote of one of his characters, too lazy to fail.
In retrospect, one precedent for the methods and success of Linux can be seen in the development of the GNU Emacs Lisp library and Lisp code archives. In contrast to the cathedral- building style of the Emacs C core and most other GNU tools, the evolution of the Lisp code pool was fluid and very user-driven. Ideas and prototype modes were often rewritten three or four times before reaching a stable final form. And loosely-coupled collaborations enabled by the Internet, a la Linux, were frequent.
回头看来，Linux的方法和成功的先例可以在GNU计划的Emacs的Lisp库和Lisp 代码文档的开发中看到。相比于用“教堂”方式开发的Emacs C 核心和大多数的其他工具，Lisp代码池的发展是流动性的，用户驱使的。想法和原型经常要被重写三四遍才能获得一个稳定的最终版本。像Linux那样通过网络的形式松散的合作是经常的。
Indeed, my own most successful single hack previous to fetchmail was probably Emacs VC (version control) mode, a Linux-like collaboration by email with three other people, only one of whom (Richard Stallman, the author of Emacs and founder of the Free Software Foundation) I have met to this day. It was a front-end for SCCS, RCS and later CVS from within Emacs that offered ``one-touch'' version control operations. It evolved from a tiny, crude sccs.el mode somebody else had written. And the development of VC succeeded because, unlike Emacs itself, Emacs Lisp code could go through release/test/improve generations very quickly.
The Emacs story is not unique. There have been other software products with a two-level architecture and a two-tier user community that combined a cathedral-mode core and a bazaar- mode toolbox. One such is MATLAB, a commercial data-analysis and visualization tool. Users of MATLAB and other products with a similar structure invariably report that the action, the ferment, the innovation mostly takes place in the open part of the tool where a large and varied community can tinker with it.