Sergiu, Thank you for the thoughtful, thorough, and reassuring response. I hope to ultimately find myself in the category of a hacker that fell in love with XWiki. I see a lot that interests me, and I see a lot of potential for "useful hacking" and, ultimately, contributing. But I'm much too old to fall into the category of someone eventually hired by XWiki SAS :-) That's not part of my life plan, while XWiki still may be.
Before I ask for help in building XWiki next week I'll do my homework and try to truly master Maven (and m2e). --Gary -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Sergiu Dumitriu Sent: Monday, July 23, 2012 4:27 PM To: XWiki Developers Subject: Re: [xwiki-devs] Are Outside Developers Really Welcome? On 07/23/2012 05:24 PM, Gary Kopp wrote: > To XWiki SAS, and non-affiliated XWiki developers: > > While XWiki meets the technical requirements of being "open source," > so far I have found it to be a bit "closed" in its pragmatic aspects. > The developers actually interacting in public on this list all seem to > be employees of the sponsors, and the communications seem to restrict > themselves to development going on internally. Over the last week or > so, questions coming in from "outsiders" (like myself) go unanswered. > It's not necessarily atypical for open source sponsors to be > unresponsive to outsiders, but the better open source projects still > encourage the active committers to provide some level of support for potential contributors. > Beyond that, when outside "hackers" (meant in a positive sense) are > tinkering with an open source project they typically do offer their > own contributions to questions raised on development mailing lists, in > those open source projects where such activity is possible and/or > encouraged. I see no evidence of outsider developers/hackers in the XWiki project. > > What finally led me to write this e-mail is my inability to build > XWiki from source. I was initially encouraged by the presence of quite > a bit of information about building in the wiki documents. But when I > actually tried to put the instructions into practice I found them to > be less than complete, and unable to be followed to a successful > conclusion (while the purpose of this e-mail is not to get help with > these problems, I will note that most of my problems revolve around > Maven). I have reached the conclusion that the only people really able > to build XWiki are its sponsors, using their own procedures, and these > procedures are _not_ those currently found on the wiki. I hope I am wrong about this. > > So, are outside developers encouraged to participate? Is any XWiki > development going on outside of the sponsoring organizations? If so, > do those developers find the current building documentation to be > adequate, and I'm simply not up to the task? > > --Gary Hi Gary, I'm going to start my answer with an excuse that covers most of the points raised in your mail: for the past week and this one as well, the XWiki SAS company is organizing an annual seminar for all its employees, and everybody is rather busy with all the activities going on here, including a hackaton that changes our priorities into getting a small project done before the end of the week. So this period is not a very good one to judge the interactions in the community. Not all the committers are employees of XWiki SAS. It is true that the largest share of contributions come from XWiki SAS personnel, but not because we're doing closed source development out in the open just to appear open source. The main reason is that whenever we find a talented person sticking around, we usually try to keep that person's interest in the project by employing him (I am such an example). Another reason is that enterprise software communities have different mechanics than user software like browsers or desktop applications. Most of the users are employees of companies using XWiki internally, and they're just trying to get some problems fixed. After their problems are fixed, they go on with their main job. It is hard to get outside users to stick around long enough to get really motivated into staying for the long term. It happens in just two cases: When their company is using XWiki not just as an internal wiki for their company, but as a platform on which they build solutions for their own clients. And we have four such committers. The second case is when they're true hackers that just happened to get in touch with XWiki, and fell in love with it. I am such a person, and Caleb is another. If you check the mailing list activity on the long term, excluding the past week, you will see that we try to answer as many questions as we can, and that the non-committers also respond to questions that they can answer. As for "better open source projects", I for one strongly believe that the XWiki community is one of the best open source communities in the world, although rather on the small to medium size. But since I am an XWiki SAS employee, feel free to doubt my opinion. Now, about the build problem, most of the time it works, but we see from time to time problems raised on the mailing list. Maven is supposed to simplify things and to "just work", but a complex build configuration is more likely to fail than a simple java library. Someone will come in and help you, but don't count on too much interaction from the XWiki SAS employees until the end of the week. I hope that you'll give us a second chance. -- Sergiu Dumitriu http://purl.org/net/sergiu/ _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
