On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 5:45 AM, Christian Grobmeier <[email protected]> wrote: > So, what now? > > I consider the ooo-forums a very important part of this project. Who > else is able to help, when Terry is gone? >
The important thing is that users have avenues of support. We were never talking about there being only one way of doing this. Even within the podling we were talking about support via forums as well as via mailing list. And we acknowledged that there was already another, independent, free support forum for these apps: http://www.oooforum.org/ as well as commercial support offerings, which there appears to be by at least SUSE and IBM, and perhaps RedHat and others in the future. So there are no shortages of ways in which users can get support for this code. For this AOOo project, we have several options: 1) Continue talking to the support forum volunteers, and discuss further how they work, and how Apache projects work, and how they can best work together. But let's not pretend that this is a do-or-die situation. Let's not force a square peg into a round hole. If they are not a good fit for Apache, then only misery will come to them if we try to force them into an Apache mold. 2) We could open discussions with the operators of www.oooforum.org to see if they would have any interest in joining AOOo, along with their volunteers. 3) We could set up our own phpBB support forum and attract volunteers. I suspect that not every single one of the 75 existing forum volunteers agrees 100% with Terry. There may be a difference of opinion and some of them might be more receptive to working within Apache. 4) We do support entirely via ooo-users lists (in various languages). Support forums (at least one, maybe two) would operate independently, outside of Apache. 5) As was suggested elsewhere on the list, have the support forums operate in their own Incubator Podling. There there are several options,some of them quite reasonable. Regards, -Rob
