Open Source Diva named CTO Options

[anthony]

So who is this Danese Cooper? I see that David Gerard created her BLP in 2005. On that point alone I'm skeptical.

[thekohser]

I wonder if the fact that Brion Vibber is being re-hired is any indication of:

1. Danese doesn't know enough about computers to do Brion's job
2. Once you're a Wikimediot, you can't last long in the "outside" work world

Maybe a little bit of both?

[Alison]

I wonder if the fact that Brion Vibber is being re-hired is any indication of:

1. Danese doesn't know enough about computers to do Brion's job
2. Once you're a Wikimediot, you can't last long in the "outside" work world

Maybe a little bit of both?

... or a little bit of neither? Let's be fair ...

[Somey]

Maybe a little bit of both?

... or a little bit of neither? Let's be fair ...

No, let's be unfair! (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/hrmph.gif)

I actually agree with Ms. Martin about why Brion Vibber would be willing to return, given that he'll be reporting to Danese Cooper and not Erik Moeller... but Mr. Kohs has actually made an interesting point here, as he often does. Sometimes the WMF management reminds me of kids let loose in a candy store (when they're not reminding me of Lord of the Flies, at least). They have lots of money, no appreciable oversight, no definable performance metrics other than just their ability to keep the websites online... it sounds like loads of fun for an IT person, and a helluva lot better for a dev/DBA than the average corporate IT shop, consulting firm, or software VAR.

That's not to say there wouldn't be some downside - in particular, the guilty-conscience thing could cause lack of sleep, what with knowing you were participating in a corrupt, socially-irresponsible fake-charity operation. But as it turns out, some people aren't really affected by that silly "conscience" stuff at all, so maybe Brion is one of the lucky ones.

[Kelly Martin]

That's not to say there wouldn't be some downside - in particular, the guilty-conscience thing could cause lack of sleep, what with knowing you were participating in a corrupt, socially-irresponsible fake-charity operation. But as it turns out, some people aren't really affected by that silly "conscience" stuff at all, so maybe Brion is one of the lucky ones.

From Brion's point of view, he's getting paid to hack on software that he'd be hacking on anyway even if he weren't being paid. The lack of meaningful performance-based management is just bonus for him, and with Danese doing the annoying "beg for money for servers" aspect of the job he can relax and get paid to play.

There was never any chance that Danese could replace Brion; her experience is on an entirely different platform and there was no chance in hell that WMF would pony up the development dollars to recode MediaWiki for the J2EE universe that Danese is from (even though doing so would likely yield them substantial performance gains). Brion is certainly one of the world's top PHP hackers, but PHP is starting to lose its twinkle (the space PHP inhabits is very faddish, and PHP is so 2004), and the clever hacks he's developed that keep Wikimedia's data farm from exploding in a BFBVFS are simply not useful in most other environments, where either (a) the hit rate simply isn't high enough to need them (nearly everyone else) or (b) they're not remotely enough to get the job done (Facebook; Google). Brion's the king of a fairly large, but rather isolated lake, and outside of that lake he's just another peasant.