On Sep 13, 2008, at 3:24 AM, Shi Yusen wrote:
David,
Great to know your guys have more and more consulting business!
Well, I wasn't actually referring to the business I'm involved in, but
rather a more general trend, based on a notice of how certain people
have been notably absent from participation in the last few months who
were significantly more active before.
Then, should there be a rule/promise to control the time split of
commitors? 50:50? I think customers can understand such conditions.
Have you really thought this through?
First off, how would the open source project enforce such a rule? Or
if you meant for a business to self impose the rule, why would they?
Second, how could a consulting company remain profitable after
throwing away 50% of its potential profits? That may be possible in
China selling to US/EU/etc where wages are typically low locally and
hourly fees have less downward price pressure, but that's not true in
the USA. For the business I'm involved in, and every consulting
business I've ever been involved in, the profit percentage is not even
near 50%, and during periods of growth with significant investments in
training usually the profit percentage is in the uncomfortable single
digit range. In other words, taking out 50% of potential profits would
generally cause the business to hit bankruptcy as soon as cash
reserves are consumed by the large monthly losses (and most smaller
and newer services businesses, like most of the ones around OFBiz)
also don't have large cash reserves. In other words, a policy like
this would kill a company within a few months. If OFBiz as an open
source project were somehow to enforce such a policy it would destroy
all services companies within a few months, and the open source
project would be a ghost town a few months after.
In general most contributions coming into OFBiz are the result of the
need of an end-user company. The way they become part of OFBiz is that
either the employees or contractors helping the end-user company make
it a priority to develop in such a way that as much as possible can be
contributed to OFBiz. What this usually means is using a combination
of generic and configurable features going into the open source
project, and then customizations and configurations used to bridge the
last gap between what newly exists in the open source project, and
what the client actually needs.
In other words, most functionality comes from paying work, and not
from people guessing about new features, then implementing and
contributing them out of good will. Also, most good functionality is
driven by real-world requirements that someone is willing to pay for,
and most of the stuff people develop by guessing about what is needed
end up being useless and eventually eliminated from the project (I
know this from hundreds of thousands of lines of my own work turning
out to be useless, and most of that is long gone from the project!).
So no, this policy would not be good for any service provider
business, or for the open source project.
The best policy for service provider companies and end-user company
employees working on OFBiz is to make contributions back to the open
source project a priority, and use some of the techniques I mentioned
above to facilitate this and make more of it possible and even natural.
-David
在 2008-09-12五的 09:59 -0600，David E. Jones写道：
Thanks again for working on this Jacopo. I made some edits and
added a few little comments, and I can't think of
anything else to put in there, so to me that means it's ready to
submit. ;)
Comments and informal votes are welcome. I'll submit this later
today or tomorrow.
-David
Jacopo Cappellato wrote:
This is a draft for the Board Report for OFBiz, due this month.
Please review,
http://docs.ofbiz.org/display/OFBADMIN/ASF+Board+Report
+2008-09+DRAFT
Jacopo
