Hi all,
I was having a bit of a surf yesterday and found this comment
from Erik:
http://phpterror.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/oxid-esales-show-me-your-94-unit-test-coverage/#comment-16
The original post was about unpublished Unit-Tests, which wasn't
terribly interesting, but it was the comment that caught my eye.
It describes the internal code deployment system of OXID and why
it's tricky to accept code contributions.
It's now clear to me why the switch to a distributed version
platform such as GIT/GITHub/BitBucket is so difficult: OXID has
one codebase, and the deployment scripts remove certain parts
for the different distributions (i.e the SOAP-Code gets removed
for PE, and the WYSIWYG-Editor gets removed for CE etc.). This
means it isn't practical or even possible for OXID to share
their code, and why we only have access to the neutered pseudo
SVN repository at
http://svn.oxid-esales.com,
where almost all authors are called "nightlybuild".
The whole structure got me thinking: why does this problem
exist?, and I'm pretty sure that it all boils down to the
marketing of the editions (CE/PE/EE). Each edition is advertised
as a separate product, each with (basically) a separate license.
Since most of the codebase of the 3 editions are the same,
people who want to contribute need to jump through hoops and
sign NDAs/similar documents to agree that the code belongs to
OXID and that they have the right to distribute it in all three
editions without the requirement of making PE/EE open-source.
So my question: why not do it differently? The name "community
edition" is (in my opinion) misleading and seems to have earned
the reputation of "take this, go away, and stop complaining
about it Dave". Why not do something completely different and
take CE, rename it to "OXID eSales Basic", keep the license as
GNU and continue to sell your commercial/encrypted PE/EE
features under a different license as 'addon packs', such as
"Professional Addon Pack" and "Enterprise Addon Pack"?
This way, you can keep the "basic" core open-source and even put
it on GitHub, where you will be able to obtain free code
contributions/patches from many many developers, and it will
still allow you to sell your advanced features and not lose
money. The community developers wouldn't have to sign any silly
NDAs either. The PE/EE Addon packs could still be versioned
internally and wouldn't have to be open-source.
So, kurz zusammengefasst, my suggestion would be:
- Replace the CE-Edition as "OXID eSales Basic"
- Sell the PE-Edition as "OXID eSales Basic + Professional Addon
Pack"
- Sell the EE-Edition as "OXID eSales Basic + Enterprise Addon
Pack"
...this would solve your licensing issues, would give you the
ability to harness the power of the OXID developer community.
And to be super-sure that you don't have to distribute your code
for PE and EE, you could deliver each product as two separate
ZIP files. e.g. (oxid-basic.zip and oxid-pe-addonpack.zip).
Internal development/continuous-integration testing wouldn't be
too hard either: you would just need a few scripts to install
OXID-Basic and the addon packs and to run your tests on them.
What does anyone else think? I know it probably won't happen,
but I fear that OXID will soon slowly die away into
insignificance if they don't update their workflows to something
more modern.
Dave
