Hi David,

congrats to getting a job, I hope you like it. No comment on those
6.5, my Ph.D took about the same time ;-). Thanks, Mozilla.

Going forward, there are a few different issues that were raised in
the discussion:

= Developer man power
 - MIT
 - Open Sourcers

I think relying on the MIT for coding shouldn't go much longer than
David being there. I personally think that going the Open Source way
will add more thrust to exhibit and timeline, and I might actually
caugh up a patch, eventually.

As for Frankenmonsters and bad code, there's a well established
process to fix that, it's called peer review. David's not going to
fall off the planet, thanks to his new employer, so there is no need
or reason for arbitrary folks checking in arbitrary stuff without him
looking at it first.
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Getting_your_patch_in_the_tree is
how a big project like Mozilla handles this, I bet that we can figure
something out that looks less scary. I expect that new reviewers grow
out of the community that's contributing patches, and there's some
level in here somewhere where getting commit priviledges is a good
idea

= Source hosting
 - MIT
 - google
 - SF

I'd go for the level of service here, in particular in terms of bug
tracking systems. SF.net is sadly enough dog-slow, ad-plastered, and
low-featured. I haven't worked on google code myself, but google
usually doesn't have performance problems, at least. I'm not sure if
MIT would offer to continue to host the sources, or even grant non-MIT
folks write access.

= Web hosting
 - MIT
 - google

I really think that SF.net is out of question here, their latency is
just yucky. It'd be nice if the MIT could continue to host the
projects, as that would ease our lives and we wouldn't have to get all
our urls changed. I'm not really sure what the requirements are,
though.

Are exhibit and timeline the only projects that are affected? We've
seen more messages about structural changes at simile, so maybe it'd
be interesting to see if there's a hosting solution out there that's
somewhat independent from MIT, but is supported by it in some way.
Other players interested in innovation on the internet might be able
to chime in, too.

= Incorporated projects

I haven't seen this being mentioned, but what's the relationship to
the tooling libs, like SimileAjax and friends?

Axel

2008/2/18, David Huynh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> Hi all,
>
>  As you might know, I have recently finished my Ph.D. study, and within a
>  few months I'll be moving on to a "real job" at Metaweb.
>
>  The Metaweb folks have been kind to let me dedicate some time toward
>  open source involvement, which means that I can continue to work on
>  Timeline, Exhibit, etc. to some extent.
>
>  However, it is clear that I won't be able to dedicate as much time to
>  those projects as I can right now. So, it is crucial that we arrange for
>  more people to get involved in those projects so that those projects
>  continue to thrive.
>
>  One possibility is to move the code bases onto an open source foundry,
>  such as Google Code, and invite the more programming capable among
>  yourself to maintain and improve them further. Note that this solution
>  is even better than the current situation, as there will be more capable
>  people involved than just me alone. Together we'll work out the
>  knowledge transfer, etc. etc. over the next few months.
>
>  Please don't hesitate to chime in here if you have other ideas or just
>  want to speak your mind. The worst thing that can happen is that nobody
>  expresses their concerns, no transition gets made, and the good code
>  just withers away.
>
>  Thanks,
>
>  David
>
>  _______________________________________________
>  General mailing list
>  [email protected]
>  http://simile.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/general
>
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