The Cathedral and the Bazaar (3)——The Importance of Having Users 用户的重要

flong19900501

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.

         我就这样接手了popclient。同样重要的是，我接受了婆婆从popclient的用户基础。拥有用户是一件很美好的事情，那不仅仅展示了你在为一项需求在服务，你在做一件正确的事情。适当地培养，他们会变成你的协助开发者。


           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.

         另一个Unix传统的优势在于很多的用户都是hacker，Linux更是把这传统推向了极致。因为代码是可以获得的，他们能够十分高效。这对缩短诊断调试时间是十分有帮助的。一点小小的激励，你的用户们就会开始诊断问题，提出解决方法，帮助你更快地改进你的代码。

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.

        这种效应的力量很容易被低估。事实上，在Linus Torvalds向我们展示其中的不同之前，几乎所有开源世界里的人都完完全全地低估了用户数量是如何让软件升级的，无论系统如何复杂。

          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.

       事实上，我认为Linus最聪明最重大的贡献不是构建了Linux内核本身，而是创造了Linux的开发模式。当我有一次在他面前这样说的时候，和笑了笑，静静地重复了一句他经常说的一句话：“我基本上是一个很懒的人，喜欢从别人所作的事情上得到我的荣誉。”像狐狸一样懒，或者像像Robert Heinlein对一个人物很有名的描写一样：太懒以至于不会失败。

        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.

       实际上，在fetchmail之前我自己最成功的一个项目应该是Emacs VC（版本控制）模式。这是种类似于Linux的合作方式，我通过电子邮件与另外的三个人联系，而且至今三个人中我只见过Richard Stallman（Emacs的作者，自由软件基金的建立者）。他是SCCS，RCS和后来的CVS的前台，Emacs借以实现单击式的版本控制。它是从有人编写的一个很小很粗糙的sccs.el模式发展而来。不同于Emacs本身，VC开发的成功在于Emacs Lisp代码能够快速的经历 发布／测试／改进 的过程。

         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.

          Emacs的故事并不是独一无二的。有很多其他的软件有这样一种组合了“教堂”式核心与“集市”式工具箱的双层结构和双层用户社区。其中一个例子就是Matlab——一个商业化的数据处理和呈现软件。Matlab和其他类似软件的用户一致这样反应：行动，孕育和创新往往发生在大的用户社区可以进行修补的开放部分。