[Cryptography] Open Source developer employment agreements, was: Cue the blamestorming

[Steve Furlong]

On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 10:34 PM, Jerry Leichter <leichter at lrw.com> wrote:

> And how much success do you have getting programmers to produce decent
Javadoc documentation?
...
> Unfortunately, once you've filtered out those who will do anything to
avoid writing documentation/comments; and those who are willing but do such
a mediocre job that it's barely worth the trouble; you don't have many
people left.  It's a real challenge.

I haven't had great success in getting good Javadoc out of the usual run of
developers. Some of that is inability, some is unwillingness.

To play off of what Jerry and Stephan and tbp-crypto say, I'm generally in
favor of getting rid of developers who just don't cut it.
Lumpenprogrammers, which is by far the majority of what I encounter, are a
net drag on a project or a team. Inability or refusal to document what
they're doing so that other developers can understand it is just one aspect
of lumpen-ness.

This applies to non-critical application and library development. I don't
have any experience with avionics or medical software and not much in
writing real-world crypto libraries, but I would think that getting rid of
the drags would be even more important here.

-- 
Neca eos omnes. Deus suos agnoscet. -- Arnaud-Amaury, 1209
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