Hello Ed, It's exciting to see some interest in the work that Markus, Mark, and I have been doing on Gen 3. It has always been, and still is the intention to bring this code into the Apache Fineract community. However doing so will require considerable effort, especially from me.
Last November I did a presentation on Fineract at ApacheCon in Seville, Spain [1]. The positive resonance was tremendous. Several people asked me in QA and again in the hall afterwards how they personally could contribute. Unfortunately because I am working on Gen 3, I could not answer that question. Instead I sent them to the mailing list, where very sadly not one person found an answer which enabled them to contribute to Fineract. I want to be the kind of person who provides actionable information, and requests, so I made a decision based on that experience: I will not ask for help on a project again until I am ready to personally guide a new contributor through the process of contributing: * getting the new project building, * understanding the project structure, * finding appropriate tickets, and * getting their pull request merged. I believe you are asking for this and more Ed. You probably want: * changes in features and additional features to support the community, * help in deploying microservices in a cloud architecture, * documentation assuring MFIs, and end users about our security architecture, plus * assistance in calls with potential customers of Gen 3. Beyond both of these lists there is still more required to make this code into part of a successful Apache project: * addition of RAT to the build process, * adjustments to the project to remove non-Apache licensed code (potentially), * communications between Mifos and Apache to donate a tranche of code to a TLP, * communication with the Apache INFRA team to set up source repositories, and artifact repositories, * adjustments to JIRA to make it possible to mark tickets for which Gen, and which component, * release management for a new kind of release structure, and * collective decision-making about the future project direction. There are probably a few tasks I haven't thought of that will have to be added to these lists. Unfortunately at this time, for various reasons, I'm not yet ready to do any of these three lists. That is the reason I have not yet brought Gen 3 to the community. Currently Kuelap is in startup mode, which I'm sure everyone here understands is a very intense mode of software development. At the same time both of my daughters are at home for summer break, so I am caring for them during work hours. Frankly I'm swamped. I'm hoping that once I have both kids started into this school year, I'll have the time to take on responsibilities within the Apache Fineract community beyond those that I'm already fulfilling, such as those on some of the lists above. It may, however, be October before the dust on my end has settled enough to make time for extra responsibilities. In the mean time however, I can give you the following assurance. While Mark and I were in Seville in November, I talked to Apache Infra about hosting multiple repositories for one project. They are ready, willing, and waiting for our tickets to create new repositories. I met with Roman in California while I was there on vacation August 2016 and again in Seville in November. Apache projects do occasionally perform re-architectings and release old and new in parallel for a while. There is no technical or organisational Apache-level obstacle to our plan of releasing Gen 2, and Gen 3 side-by-side for a while. In fact we have a lot of good will from the ASF. As you know I've also created a plan for how to assemble our releases out of multiple independent repositories and sent it to the Fineract community for feedback [2]. There is no currently identified obstacle to collecting our release out of multiple repositories. Best Regards, Myrle Krantz 1.) https://feathercast.apache.org/2017/01/26/apachecon-seville-2016-introducing-apache-fineract-incubating-myrle-krantz/ 2.) https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FINERACT/Composing+a+Release+out+of+Microservices On Fri, Jul 28, 2017 at 11:10 PM, Ed Cable <edca...@mifos.org> wrote: > Hello Apache Fineract Community, > > As communicated throughout numerous webinars and white papers across the > Mifos and Apache Fineract communities, the future of our technology centers > around our Generation 3 architecture (Apache Fineract 2.0). > > I'm starting this thread to initiate the process of moving this new > codebase and next major version of Apache Fineract into the community so we > can at last mobilize the community around the new architecture. > > Right now the codebase is in a Github Repository at > https://github.com/mifosio but the community cannot fully participate until > it's part of Apache and there is little visibility or documentation for the > community to know of the status of Generation 3. > > Across the community there is a groundswell of interest from partners and > volunteers to contribute to, build on top of, and extend the new > architecture. I've informed these individuals that have expressed interest > in private to do so publicly and engage more actively on the lists. > > I have started a wiki page to list out the next steps/outstanding questions > we need to explore to proceed forward. I request that others, especially > those who have lead the design and development of Generation 3, please > expand this list and take responsibility and ownership for some of the > outstanding tasks so we can get Fineract 2.0 available to the community. > > https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FINERACT/Finerac > t+2.0+Introduction > > A prior concern that we've explored was the ability to maintain two major > versions of a software within one Apache project. Based on my conversations > with Apache leadership like Brian Behlendorf at the recent OSCON > conference, there is no issue with a project having two live major versions > at the same time. > > Thanks, > > *Ed Cable* > President/CEO, Mifos Initiative
