On Thursday 08 February 2007 21:46, Sunburned Surveyor wrote:
> I spent the lunch thinking about what Stefan, Larry, and Jan-Oliver had been
> talking about. I have written a post on my OpenJUMP blog that gives everyone
> involved or interested in OpenJUMP something to think about. You can read
> the post here:
>
> http://openjump.blogspot.com/
good summary of the situation.
One way out of the dilemma (or at least something that might help) is
to look at the professional users willing to pay and at the companies that do
receive contracts
for improving OpenJump (like Intevation did, though only for a tiny feature so
far).
Of course such contracts are typically feature-centric. The art of sustainable
Free Software is to take care for the base work out of these feature-driven
developments. One option is maintenance contracts for professional users.
This is successful for a number of Free Software products, but really
needs quite some time to take of -- and it is not possible to achieve this
for any product.
Another option is that there are simply enough 'little' contracts, so that
those companies getting them are interested to take an active role
for the base work (you can observe this for UMN MapServer).
The many JUMPs around make it difficult to get there. And it is especially
not in the interest of the professional users as they want to profit from
a consolidating core in mid-term. Features within a forked
JUMP are only cheaper in short-term view.
Don't get me wrong - I've seen so absolutley great features in those JUMPs,
those guys do a really good job.
But I've not seen good rationale for the forks, except that it was easy to start
since no discussion with other developers needed. Maybe thats one thing OpenJUMP
should focus on: argue why a fork is suboptimal and concurrently offer help
to cope with keeping development a bit more stream-lined.
I know this is easily said while not offering to take over this job -- please
forgive me.
However, at least I will continue to make people aware of these facts ;-)
All the best
Jan
--
Jan-Oliver Wagner: www.intevation.de/~jan | GISpatcher: www.gispatcher.de
Kolab Konsortium : www.kolab-konsortium.de | Thuban : thuban.intevation.org
Intevation GmbH : www.intevation.de | Kolab : www.kolab.org
FreeGIS : www.freegis.org | GAV : www.grass-verein.de
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