Op Fri, 1 Sep 2006, schreef Dossy Shiobara:
> 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. A successfull open source project needs a few ingredients. I'll compare with my own project, Free Pascal Compiler: * People who push the development. For FPC this means that the core team does the dirty work of advancing register allocations, optimizations and ports to new processors etc. * A community that helps with the development. For example, we ported FPC to the ARM processor. This is pushing development. Once this was done, people jumped out of bushes from all directions to apply it, now we have Free Pascal for Windows CE, Free Pascal for Nintendo Game Boy, all done by people from community. * Good documentation. The importance of documentation is often underestimated, but it is one of the main things potential users look at when investigating wether something can do what they need. * Low bureaucracy to contribute. Wikis are succesfully used here, but the real challenge is low bureaucracy patch contributions. * Self-help support facilties, i.e. FAQs, user mailing-lists, forums. Now lets look at AOLserver for these ingredients: * People who push development. Well, AOLserver is not a intense developed project, but there is active development. The 4.5 release is a big improvement over 4.0, and so is 4.0 over 3.5. * A community that helps with the development. The community rarely contributed patches, but writes modules and does it well, giving AOLserver an interresting collection of modules. * Good documentation The documentation documents a rather complete set of the API and configuration. However, the accessibility and readability is bad, the layout often sucks. * Low bureaucracy to contribute I once contributed a patch. It was ignored, despite positive comments. While obviously there are no bad intentions, this sucks. Users can contribute to the documentation. * Self-help support facilties. Well, we have this mailinglist, but other than that, there aren't much facilities. Some information that many people want to know, for example how to run Apache and AOLserver on 1 IP-address cannot be found at the moment. It has to be said that things were better during the 3.0 period. The web site was better, interesting knowledge could be found in the AOLserver community forums. So, AOLserver has a lot of ingredients for being a successfull open source project, but some are lacking. Improving the project might help as much as promoting it. Daniël -- 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.
