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Postnuke politics: a user's view

Contributed by on Aug 30, 2002 - 05:29 PM

Before the change in the project's management, as a user I almost didn't notice who was in charge, or what was happening in the internals. John Cox and other names were more or less known to me, but just as "developers".




Now it seems that HarryZ is everywhere. Just looks like he changed his last name to Postnuke, and named his children Rogue and Mutant. I mean, previously the Postnuke code was just developed and released, now the released code is visibly a result of political struggle.




Developing opensource has always been an Ego driven (if you remember the PHP-Nuke and Postnuke fork).


Now I don't know how long HarryZ has been around in the project, but I would suppose that all core developers were already talking to John Cox before HarryZ joined. Whereas the title of PM is clearly a hierarchic title, the developers may have been tied to John Cox on a more personal level, so that in addition to maybe being pissed off that they weren't chosen as PM, they were maybe also confronted to the reality of hierarchy in the postnuke project. This is equal to a degradation of their rank and status in the project, they have realized that they are not "eternal fathers of the postnuke wonder of the world" but just devs - not less, not more.




That's why the team is new - the remaining people have less problems accepting the current leadership.




But I can't help thinking that the change of leadership has been ill-managed by John Cox and HarryZ. Or maybe this task was too difficult and just not doable considering the dev's Egos... No one will ever know.




What does it mean for HarryZ? He must show his leadership, affirm it and show that there are teammembers accepting it. There's no other way than reapeatedly posting messages and making decisions.




What does this mean for me as a user?


Before the exodus I thought that Postnuke had about 90% chance to be developed to a 1.0 release, and that the finished product would be widespread, with further development and versions.


Now I must objectively say that the risk increased drastically that Postnuke will not reach these goals, partly also because of the deaths in the team.




The themes question certainly needed to be addressed, and the new possibilities are stunning. But the themes, let's face it, are a short term cosmetical change - the core also needs to be worked on.




Today I am worried that the Postnuke that I love will be left on the road by some other opensource product, because of uncontrollable Egos.


But since we cannot undo what has happened, I appeal to HarryZ and to the former devs to focus on the goal and make Postnuke also my future choice!




Regards,


Manarak.
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