Ugo and Jan-Oliver,
I've gotten a couple of responses to this issue of collaboration. I am
putting together a some suggested solutions that might help us improve this
situation to everyone's benefits.
I'll need another day or two to get things wrapped up. I'll let the list
know when I'm finished, so Stefan and others can review what I put together.
It's really just a rough outline of some ideas, and I expect they'll change
after we have some discussion. I'd like to have some procedures that
everyone can agree with and voluntarily follow, but at the same time that
address some of the challenges we face.
I didn't want anyone to think that I was listening or planning to follow
trough with this.
The Sunburned Surveyor
On 2/14/07, Ugo Taddei <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hello Jan,
Jan-Oliver Wagner wrote:
> 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.
I think this requires a change in the attitude of the users, really. And
by that
I don't mean the single user, but rather institutions that are willing to
pay
less for a GIS, but somehow willing to pay. People haven't really learned
to
discern between free software and free beer.
> 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.
Absolutely. One thing wrong in JUMP/OpenJUMP is the hard-coded
configuration. By
devising a way of configuring the application, we might bridge the gap
between
different versions. These versions differ on two aspects, basically: the
GUI and
the plug-ins/extensions they offer.
I'm for central an OpenJUMP version, with basic plug-ins and with a
developer-friendly way of defining a Setu up/Configuration file.
>
> 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
>
I agree with with, but who's got the resources to embrace the application
and
manage the project?
As you said, most work is feature-driven, with paying users not realising
that
there's management and improvement work needed to be done.
Cheers,
Ugo
--
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Aennchenstrasse 19 53177 Bonn, Germany
phone ++49 +228 184960 fax ++49 +228 1849629
http://www.lat-lon.de http://www.deegree.org
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