That would be great Adrian. I noticed you were working on the example
component, which will be part of this framework release. Actually, the
example and webtools components are the only ones that really have a
UI to them, so work in those areas would be especially great right now.
For the press release: I'll definitely keep you in the loop. I'm not
totally sure how that will work, but I think we need to create a draft
or at least tell the story and then the Apache PRC folks can help us
refine and distribute it.
-David
On May 2, 2008, at 8:39 AM, Adrian Crum wrote:
I can spend some time going through the UI and make sure it's
compatible with the latest IE. I was planning on doing that anyway.
Plus, I have experience with preparing press releases.
-Adrian
David E Jones wrote:
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
