Hi all; I figured it would be time to send out an email discussing contributions and encouraging them. It also lays out my vision for what the LedgerSMB contributor community should eventually look like. I expect contributions to occur in roughly types: Primary contributions for modules, secondary contributions based on specific business needs, and solicited contributions by people looking for ways to participate.
So let's start off with my vision of where I would like the LedgerSMB community to go. The community right now is largely a collection of some independent service providers and consultants around me and to a lesser extent Command Prompt. Virtually every aspect of the software I seem to have a hand in. Currently I have made over 2/3rds of the commits in the history of the project. This structure limits the scalability and robustness of our community, and while I have no doubt that there are others who could step in to take my place, we would be better off with more heavy contributors (it would mean a much larger user base, and hence more business for everyone, to be honest). What I envision is a set of interlocking "expert communities" each one with one or more central experts, other strong contributors, and a user base. The overall community would still be under the umbrella of LedgerSMB. The goal is that of a community which cuts across different types of members and helps businesses and users find eachother. This is not likely ever to be a benevolant dictatorship but rather a guild-like group run by committee. The life-blood are the small businesses which offer services and support based on LedgerSMB and help bring it to new customers. I: PRIMARY CONTRIBUTIONS So, suppose you have an idea that would make LedgerSMB better. This can be made into a reality by any of three ways. You can discuss the change with the community, get feedback and buy-in, make the changes yourself, and contribute them to the community, you can pay someone to do this for you, or you can try to convince people that their businesses will benefit by providing some of the labor and/or cost involved. In general, the advantages of doing things the first way both to the individual who puts in the work and to the community outweigh the other options, if this is coming from a business that wants to make money offering services on the software. This is far more of the case when we are talking about new functionality that doesn't exist. Implementing new functionality allows an individual to become the "go-to" person in a subfield of LedgerSMB. For example, if someone wants to create a simple MRP module, this would allow them to enter into the community as a resident expert of a particular topic, and this is helpful. My suggestion to anyone who wants to start a business in an area currently unserved or underserved is do it, and get as much help from the community as you can. This could be anything from selling pre-configured servers to building functionality for new markets. There is an important corollary here. In the past people have come to me and asked for feedback about other markets, and when they have found out I have put time and energy into planning a *possible* business entry, they back off. In general the major result is that I get busy, don't enter the market, and they don't either. This is not a good pattern. My feeling is that even if I am in a specific business market anyway, I will generally be happy to help new people enter it. There is no reason to think that the customer target markets will be identical and even if they are, there's only so much I can do. I'd rather have a smaller piece of a larger pie than a larger piece of a smaller one. To date, we have received a few primary contributions including the new contact management schema (Joshua Drake), the new single payment interface (David Mora), the new tax and template systems (Seneca Cunningham), and the new installation documentation and tools (Erik Huelsmann). I am sure I am missing some people but those are the ones that come to mind. II: Secondary contributions Very little needs to be said here. We are getting a certain number of these. Keep them coming. I would however suggest that anyone who is trying to make contributions here and build a business should feel free to advertise the fact that they are a contributor. III: Solicited Contributions So, suppose you want to start a business making money with LedgerSMB and you are looking for a way to build your skills at developing the software, as well as provide a way of differentiating yourself from your competition. It can be helpful to get involved, know what folks are trying to get done, and start making contributions. Such contributions can help build subject-matter expertise not only on the software side but also on the business process side as ideas for changes get discussed, etc. As we work on replacing the old code with new code, this is an important area where people can get involved, and where solicited contributions can become primary ones. For example, between 1.3 and 1.4, I expect to be working on refining the framework a bit and moving over old code for financial transactions to the new approach. If anyone wants to help lighten the load that would naturally be appreciated. But if someone wanted to target something else, like project management or goods and services, this would be appreciated too. I expect to put up a list of things we would like additional help with when possible. IV: Specific concerns "So I don't know Perl or PostgreSQL very well." That's ok. Nearly all of the software is done in PostgreSQL stored procedures and HTML forms via TemplateToolkit. Getting the database stuff right and the user interface right is a large part of the work. You can always contribute the parts you can and try to work with others to get the rest of it put together. If nothing else, it will drastically decrease the effort others have to put into tying everything together. Do what you can. Let others pick up the rest. Of course everything will have a learning curve regarding how we do things, so don't let any of that stop you from slowly talking on other parts you are less familiar with. Best Wishes, Chris Travers ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ uberSVN's rich system and user administration capabilities and model configuration take the hassle out of deploying and managing Subversion and the tools developers use with it. 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