[OSGeo-Discuss] scale of FOSS projects

[Paul Ramsey]

On May 8, 2008, at 3:32 PM, Miles Fidelman wrote:
> With rare exception (there are geniuses among us), it's pretty hard  
> for one person to accomplish all that much, in a short amount of  
> time, in odd hours outside their day job.  At least none of the  
> interesting projects I've been involved with required at least 6  
> months of full-time work show initial results - not a part-time  
> endeavor.

 From tiny acorns do mighty oak trees grow.  Mapserver started with a  
shape file -> image renderer and an HTML templating engine.  Working,  
useful, code.  From that, you can grow a community, who can grow the  
code.  It might seem impossible to iteratively turn a Piper Cub into a  
737, but in the software world it seems to happen all the time.

Linus didn't write all of Linux. But he wrote enough for it to be  
useful.

Too much philosophy, not enough code. :)

P.