+1. David mentioned a main puzzle for OFBiz: how to lower down the requirements on a OFBiz programmer. Currently, a qualified OFBiz programmer must be a superman. I think split the requirements to consultant part and programmer part may help. As we know, in large service providers, consultants contact customers and sometimes even have the power to change customers' decissions on IT platforms.
For consultants, a standard OFBiz consulting proceedure is required. >From our limited pratices, perhaps fish-born diagram is an effective way to help consultants setup a bridge between OFBiz customers and OFBiz programmers. The main born is the core business process of a customer and every small born is a component in OFBiz such as order, catalog and etc. Making a room for consultants, having a room for OFBiz. BTW, here are our contribution plan of this year on OFBiz (for programmers ^_^, you can get the plan's Chinese version here: http://www.langhua.cn/jianjie/dev-plan-2008.html): 1. Digital Signature component (based on OpenOCES, coming soon) 2. Single Sign On component based on CAS 3. Continue the Simplified Chinese translation 4. Portlets based on rmiservice component 5. OFBiz + jBPM (coming soon) Regards, Shi Yusen/Beijing Langhua Ltd. 在 2008-04-29二的 22:06 -0600，David E Jones写道： > On Apr 29, 2008, at 2:54 PM, Ean Schuessler wrote: > > David E Jones wrote: > >> This is a great tool. The problem with the tool and the approach in > >> general to this sort of release management is that it assumes top- > >> down management of a project. > >> > >> In the Release Plan document it starts out by explaining the nature > >> of OFBiz and the community that drives it. Most ASF projects, and > >> many other open source projects, are community driven but are also > >> more limited in scope and have either an existing specification to > >> work toward, or have a sufficiently limited scope that the > >> definition of targets for a release is not overly burdensome. > >> > >> With OFBiz it's not just the size of the scope, but the fact that > >> the scope depends on what different contributors to OFBiz need over > >> time, for themselves or their clients/customers. If we had a budget > >> for driving OFBiz top-down that could result in the same volume of > >> progress it would have to be around $5-10M per year (my own > >> estimate of course, no Gartner or the like has deigned to look into > >> this). > >> > >> In short there is a reason why OFBiz is the only real community > >> driven open source enterprise automation project out there. The > >> closest alternative is probably Adempiere, but that is more of a > >> community driven effort to replace a bad vendor that has mostly > >> stepped out of the picture. > >> > >> So, until someone comes along with a sufficient budget to drive > >> things in a more "traditional" way, we have to stick with what > >> works according to what people are willing and able to contribute. > > I think if we really believe in the community oriented model that we > > shouldn't view ourselves as "just waiting for a budget to go back to > > a top-down model". We know that the top-down model always leads to > > lock in and all the other negatives of a single monolithic vendor. > > The Linux kernel has already shown that you can get distributed > > scale with multiple large vendor players giving the power assist. I > > think that's the future we want to be living in. > > I can't speak for everyone here, but my opinion of the driving force > behind OFBiz is definitely the community. My comments were not meant > to imply that certain things can't happen without corporate or other > sponsorship from a big enough single entity, but that such is not the > nature of the OFBiz community or any community driven projects, so we > have to rely on what people are willing to contribute, a la the > community driven open source model. > > That said, one of the big objectives as I see it now for OFBiz is to > develop the community, a sort of business development for open source > projects. Our focus in the past for community develop has been mostly > around fostering and encouraging contributors. Now that we have a > strong framework and generic business artifacts base in order for > adoption of OFBiz to grow we need stronger service providers and a > wider community of users, whether or not they also participate as > contributors. > > My reasoning behind that is that most enterprise (and other) products > are created and driven by a central company and to a large extent it > is the reputation and name of that company that drives people to > accept and desire the software offered. > > While OFBiz itself can be a brand that we as a community promote, > OFBiz itself has no funds for marketing or evangelism, leaving the > burden of those efforts to the community, to whoever wants to > contribute such things. In order for large companies to use OFBiz on a > wider basis they need a reputation and name to sell to stakeholders in > their organization. Eventually I hope that OFBiz will have such a name > on its own, but for now that's sadly not the case. > > In short if we can work together to attract larger services > organizations to the OFBiz community and to grow services > organizations working based on OFBiz it will open things up for the > next stage of growth and progress for the project. > > Right now there are large services organizations using OFBiz, but not > advertising such or proposing it to their clients so much, partly > because of limited internal skilled people available (from what I can > tell...). Most of their projects are because their clients are > requesting OFBiz, but the services organizations are not recommending > it. Some examples I'm aware of include Euro/Amer companies like > Accenture and Indian companies like TCS, Satyam, etc. > > I'm not sure if these companies are used to recommending solutions and > doing marketing, but they are the largest organizations involved with > OFBiz (aside from end-users) and because OFBiz doesn't have it's own > marketing budget and coordinated efforts, the service providers are > the only ones with a sufficient commercial interest to invest in this. > > Now, if we could get press attention even though we don't have money > to push it we might make some great progress. However, and this might > be based on my jaded view of the world, but most press organizations > talk about what is making money, even in the open source world. Apache > gets in the news sometimes because of games played with Sun and > others, and because of large user bases for lower level tools in many > cases. > > Anyway, this is a big effort going forward that I've been thinking > about lately, ie the business development around OFBiz... not so much > of OFBiz itself as that only applies so much, but around OFBiz. > > That said one of our big tools for that is to do GA binary releases > and make a big stink about them. That's probably the strongest tool > any open source project has. > > To start that off I'd like to focus on the framework and do a release > branch and a GA binary release of it. After that we'd move on to the > base applications along with the framework. For the framework itself > the things that we need help with and to consider are: > > 1. is there anything in the framework that we should or want to clean > up before we do a release and "set things in stone" more than they are > now? > > 2. are there new features that we've been talking about for while that > we should just develop and include? (the entity field automatic > auditing feature is one I decided to spend a couple of hours adding > yesterday; LDAP auth OOTB would be another nice one to add, and I'm > sure there are more) > > 3. are there critical bugs or security holes we should fix? (one thing > that comes to mind is tools and default behavior where applicable to > protect against XSS/cross-site-scripting) > > 4. who can help with this? who can help test and write unit tests for > the framework? who can help implement new features and fix bugs and > such? > > What we really need here from contributors is pro-active effort. If > you'd like to help but you're not sure what to work on you can ask, > but please be sensitive about requesting assistance or mentoring from > core developers or other contributors as that may keep them from doing > things that can be directly contributed. In other words, we need > people who can help get this done and while we're at it if there are > others who want to get involved please do in a pro-active, self- > motivated way. > > BTW, sorry for hijacking your comment Ean... I've been thinking about > this a lot lately and responding to your comment seemed to flow into > this. > > -David > >
