On Sun, 2006-04-30 at 10:49 +0000, jonathon wrote:
> Ian Lynch wrote:

> > all that is required is the political will to look a bit beyond next year
> 
> It isn't political will,

It is, its down to Sun's internal policies as to what gets done jsut as
much as the community perspective - some would say more so. That is
politics - micropolitics perhaps, but nevertheless politics.

>  as much as it is sheer practicality.   I've
> forgotten how many lines of code there are, but when I specked it out,
> it looked like a six man month operation.   Then there is the lag
> between the time the new code is incorporated in to the existing code
> base, and then the bug fixes, because people called libraries that have
> been removed.
> 
> But this is something that needs to be done, sooner rather than later.

It will be dependent on someone with the authority in Sun who has the
vision to see why it is of strategic importance. That really is down to
politics not necessarily our version of rationality. One hopes
politicians are always informed by rationality but its not always the
case and of course different people see rational arguments differently,
that is the essence of politics. If the decision maker believes that
code efficiency is not too important and will take a lot of effort with
little in the way of visible returns they might well go for a short term
fix that would translate into eg more desktop sales of Star Office or
whatever. 

>From an Open Source community perspective, better code and long term
strategy would probably be the obvious priority. Sun has other
constraints so their perspective could well be different. Point is we
don't really know and at least it would motivate the grass roots
community members to be part of the discussion. Its months since the
launch of 2.0 so there must surely be some plans for 2.1 and 3.0. Its
rather surprising that these have not been discussed much here on the
discuss list. What is the discuss list for? One would expect to discuss
strategy issues at length and then come to some decisions that everyone
can get behind. Seems difficult for eg the marketing project to market
when there is no clear development path. We also waste a lot of time
dealing with threads like the mail client one because no-one knows
whether or not the issue is relevant to current plans or not.

So what is the development strategy? Is there a reason for it being a
secret? 

-- 
Ian Lynch
www.theINGOTs.org
www.opendocumentfellowship.org
www.schoolforge.org.uk


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