[Freedombox-discuss] Straight and Narrow.

[Michael Rogers]

On 24/10/11 02:18, Sandy Harris wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 7:53 AM, Weaver <weaver at riseup.net> wrote:
> 
>> I believe in the Debian way. Don't release till ready. You'll kill less
>> people that way.
> 
> Yes, especially for a project like this. Releasing something that
> was easily broken might get users who trusted it imprisoned or
> even killed. Far better to wait until we are reasonably sure we
> have it right.
> 
> On the other hand, we need not release everything at once.
> If useful parts of the system are ready, but not everything,
> we could release a version with limited functionality.

Forgive me if I'm speaking out of turn - I haven't contributed a single
line of code to this project - but I think it's an excellent idea to get
the non-safety-critical parts of the code released as soon as possible.

Perhaps it would even be worth doing a quick triage of the proposed
design to see which components are needed for the "get your data out of
the cloud" use case and which are needed for the "dissident
communication" use case. The "dissident communication" components could
be held back until they're finished, while the other components could be
released early and often.

Otherwise I think there's a danger that the "dissident communication"
goal - which is very important but also very hard - could block progress
on all the other things the project could be achieving.

Cheers,
Michael