Le mardi 28 octobre 2008 à 18:37 +0100, Felix Schwarz a écrit : > Julien Valroff schrieb: > > Could someone try and sum up what would be the required competences to > > set up such a fork? > > The same as always: Developers which are willing to work. As Jani I'm on > this list since several years. For every fork talk, something is > missing: People saying "I will do".
Some of them (I am one of them) *will* do. But as you know, we all have different skills. It is clear that a fork needs skilled developers, but not only. > Please stop offering hosting etc. This doesn't matter imho. What is > missing (and it was missing for every single fork thread in the past) is > developers. So if you are no developer, there is not much you can do. I do not agree at all: all projects need testers, translators, people ready to write documentation (too often forgotten by developers) etc. This REALLY makes the difference between a simple project and a great project, especially as far as opensource development is concerned. Look at Debian (one of the major opensource project: they are trying to attract people who have no special developer skills - see [1] for more information) > Any successful fork will need developers which do the hard work without > immediate gains. So I think a successful fork will 'just happen' by > someone who develops for his own and send patches. If there are enough > patches floating around, someone will set up more infrastructure. several patches were sent to the -devel list, without nobody seems to care about them. > And don't bet on the hope that 'maybe not everyone is informed'. Getting > real developers (and not 'web developers') which can code C with high > quality is extremly hard. So either there are people on this list which > do just start or DSPAM will be frozen like the last years. To avoid this situation, I would prefer doing my best before giving up! I think you might underestimate the power of the community advertising (I am aware I might overestimate it as well!). This would also show SN that dspam is a product which cannot be given up as people *do* use it. > fs > > PS: Don't get me wrong - I would really like to see more development > activities. But don't be naive: A successful fork is very hard and as a > non-developer you probably underestimate the effort needed by a factor > of 10. You might be right, or not. I am acting as a project manager (in a totally different sector than IT), and am aware what it can mean. But without keeping hope, that is clear things won't change! Please, let's wait what others think. If everybody's opinion is that there is no hope to start a fork, then I guess it might be time for SN to either give up dspam officially, or work again actively on the project (and at least show their intentions). Cheers, Julien [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/10/msg00005.html !DSPAM:1011,49075177150924154313692!
