Well... yes, all our customers who are technically savvy enough to
understand know that we use AOLserver. Unfortunately, the fact that
OpenACS requires AOLserver is a hindrance in the sales cycle, and
there have been repeated requests from many people over the years for
OpenACS to run under Apache (which is never going to happen). Part
of the problem is the association with AOL - rightly or wrongly, that
inspires a "fight or flight" response in many of the IT people we
talk to. But the biggest issue is that it's different, and
Enterprise customers generally don't want to take on a new web server
for their admins to have to learn and support.
As far as the community goes... I have been using AOLserver since
early 1999; that's 7.5 years. During that time, I have maybe looked
at the source a dozen times, if that, and usually I don't find what
I'm looking for. It's an application that requires specialized
domain knowledge to understand, written in a language I haven't
worked in professionally for almost 20 years. It's not where I can
spend my time most effectively. I think there are relatively few
people out there who really *want* to dive into the internals of a
web server, and most of them are working on Apache. So the
participating community does not have a huge pool of people to draw on.
Even writing documentation would be a big investment of time for me,
because in order to document something one has to really understand
what it does, and right now the only way to do that is to read the
source. Maybe it makes me a bad person, but I just don't have that
much time to invest in this.
I think we have a bit of a catch-22 situation here. There are only a
handful of people who are knowledgeable enough about AOLserver to
help those who are having trouble. Those people are overloaded and
are not able to provide the hand-holding needed by users who don't
know how to use debugging tools and fix their own problems. So
people either stop using AOLserver, or they learn to put up with or
work around problems they aren't able to fix on their own. And so
the community stays small, and enthusiasm for participating is dampened.
There were a lot more attempts at community participation years ago,
but they were mostly rebuffed. Patches being rejected for no good
reason used to be a fairly frequent topic on this list. That also
set a tone of people not wasting their time contributing which
probably persists to this day even though the person responsible is
long gone.
Unfortunately, it is much easier to describe the problem than it is
to find solutions. About the best suggestion I can think of is that
you may get more participation if you realize that although most of
us are developers, very few of us are AOLserver developers. It's not
enough to throw open the gates and invite us to participate. There
has to be some way for those who are so inclined to gain the basic
knowledge needed to be useful, and right now that's just not there.
My $0.02,
janine
On Sep 1, 2006, at 11:10 AM, Dossy Shiobara wrote:
I'd like to share with the community a comment made by someone at AOL:
|| My problems with AOLserver are:
||
|| 1) The lack of documentation, which is annoying, but could be
fixed.
||
|| 2) The tiny userbase, which [AOL] simply can't fix. Not unless AOL
|| puts 10 times more support into the product than they ever have in
|| the past and that's not gonna happen.
I know that the sad state of the documentation has been a big problem
for a long time. I'd really like to hear suggestions from everyone as
to how we might go about solving it.
Does it all have to be written by one or two people? Can the work be
distributed? Where do we start? Should we take the old documentation
and just freshen it up? Do we need to start with a new draft Table of
Contents and start over? What is keeping folks from contributing
(time,
expertise, money, something else)? What format do folks want: dead
tree
books, online e-books, both, something else entirely?
With respect to the size of the community, what can we do to grow it?
We definitely need more evangelism: marketing, communication with the
press, white papers, etc. Do folks in the AOLserver community attend
trade shows and conferences? Which ones? Do you tell folks about
AOLserver? Why or why not?
If you have a commercial product built on top of AOLserver, do your
customers know this? Do you mention the existence of this
community to
them? If not, why not?
I realize there are folks located all around the world, but if I
organized it, would folks be willing to travel for an AOLserver
Conference? Where would people want to attend it (excluding obvious
destinations like "Hawaii" and "on a cruise ship" that may be slightly
out of our reach right now, :-)? Would anyone be willing to volunteer
to help organize it?
Even if we can't achieve it, I'd like everyone to help put together a
plan and the roadmap for AOLserver into 2007. Not just development
milestones and features, but all of the project's activities that we
want to try and accomplish.
I'm far from ready to give up on AOLserver and I'm reaching out to
everyone to say ... if ever you wanted to help, now is the time.
Share
your thoughts and I think together, we can all make this happen.
-- Dossy
--
Dossy Shiobara | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://dossy.org/
Panoptic Computer Network | http://panoptic.com/
"He realized the fastest way to change is to laugh at your own
folly -- then you can let go and quickly move on." (p. 70)
--
AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/
To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> with the
body of "SIGNOFF AOLSERVER" in the email message. You can leave the
Subject: field of your email blank.
--
AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/
To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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