On Dec 28, 2006, at 6:54 PM, Walter Vaughan wrote:
[..snip..]
Golly, what a can of worms is open here. Actually what drew me to
ofBiz was the amount of updates to the system.
The last commercial ERP solution we considered was SYSPRO. The
folks at Syspro PRIDE themselves on weekly ports to their software.
I have/had an .iso of a marketing DVD they have with almost two
hours of non-stop preaching how ERP systems must and should be
updated on a continuous basis, and that point release updates are
evil. (e.g. 5.0 -> 6.0 on done every 18 months)
I was sold. Couldn't justify the seat costs for the number I
needed, but I was sold on the concept. During our courting period I
also got a weekly email that was similar to what Si Chen does with
his blog listing the dozen or so improvements to the system in the
past week, and this in an ERP system with 15,000 current installs.
As a end user, what I am looking for is non-failure. Thus far I
have more than enough trust in the core developers to always do the
right thing.
I think this really comes down to community needs. There is and
always will be a trunk moving forward with both new features and bug
fixes and we'll always want to keep it as stable as possible, and
people can update whenever they want to.
This is another reason I like the idea of a long period between
creating new release branches: developers will hopefully never think
that they can commit something risky without checking it out thinking
that it won't affect anyone...
Still, I think there is enough demand in the community for periodic
releases. There is also a marketing aspect here that I think is
important, especially as we get out as a real ASF project and are
wanting to attract new users as well as help other people get an idea
of what OFBiz is all about.
-David
