On Jan 4, 2007, at 12:59 AM, Ian McNulty wrote:
I think this is very much of interest, and to a lot of people.
These all sound like they would make great derivative works of
OFBiz, either commercial or open source. I'd say for right now
that getting something very slick for any of these groups it
outside the scope and current resources of OFBiz, but that doesn't
mean these are a bad idea.
Sounds good to me. Am now wondering where the necessary resources
may be?
Yes, very good question... elusive little buggers these do seem to be
at best!
If you happen to find any, do ring me right away!
More seriously, I think there is some potential for open source
communities based around certain industries, but my guess has been
and remains to be that gathering resources to address these smaller
markets will be more difficult than it was to attract a developer and
contributor base to something more generic like OFBiz. So, in many of
the small markets a more financial means of collaboration may be
necessary.
A lot of the discussion here seem to be around the fact that OFBiz is
so distastefully generic, and yet if it were too industry specific or
meant to address only a small part of the world of enterprise
automation functionality, the fact is most of us wouldn't be here...
This is about the point where the end of loop n meets the beginning
of loop n+1 and the search for a solution causes headaches, or at
best teaches one a great deal about cautious optimism and patience.
In fact, even "in the beginning" we had the intent to build OFBiz
in such a way that such things could be built on top of it (or
from it, depending on how you look at things), and be done in
either an open source or commercial model, or even a combination
of the two like the CRMSFA application from Open Source
Strategies. There are actually a few other open source and
commercial applications that use different parts of OFBiz (see the
User List page on docs.ofbiz.org).
User List? Can't see that. Maybe I ought to try getting some sleep
myself :)
Sorry for the nebulous reference. You can find such things using the
search box, hidden away in the upper right corner. Here is the actual
link:
http://docs.ofbiz.org/x/ZQM
It should be noted that by our best guess this represents only a
small percentage of OFBiz users. Many of these were found a long time
ago by googling around for common URL patterns, which we really
should do again some time. Still, it is an interesting thing to
review to liven up a dreary winter day.
-David
