Any other comments on this? I'd really love to get the framework
shaped up and cleaned up as much as we plan to for the near future so
we can release something and keep it stable for a while...
Related to this, when we release the framework I really want to put
some stuff together to talk it up and get the ideas in it out to the
world. Part of that would be more docs and marketing material, and
another part of it would be some press releases that go through the
ASF public relations group. If any one or any company wants to get
involved with that please speak up! I'll try to coordinate it for now,
but there is certainly room for public credit and mention of
contributors to the relevant materials.
-David
On Apr 29, 2008, at 10:06 PM, David E Jones wrote:
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
