Ted Husted wrote:
On 2/25/06, Allen Gilliland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
As Ted said, we should be
working to meet the needs of our frontline customers and I believe that
means blogs.sun.com followed by IBM, jRoller, and on.
Customer is an interesting word when applied to an open source
project. The dictionary definition is "One that buys goods or
services", but the ASF isn't selling anything. All of our software is
provided to the public at no charge.
Looking beyond "buy", customers are the people who make the product
possible. In the context of an open source project, the people who
make the project possible are people like Dave, and Allen, and Avil,
and Henri, and Matt, and all other other committers and contributors.
Our customers are the people who provide patches and posts. Other
people who simply download and use the software are *potential*
customers (or "users"). From an ASF perspective, the core customer is
the PMC.
I am new to the ASF so I apologize for my ignorance, but how is the PMC
our core customer? Who is the PMC you are talking about?
Now, if it is important to Allen and Dave, two of our best customers,
that Roller meet the needs of blogs.sun.com then it should be
important to the rest of the community too. But, blogs.sun.com is only
important because it is important to Allen and Dave. Sun cannot be a
committer, and so Sun can never be a true customer. Only individuals
can be committers, and ASF committer rights are *never* contingent on
employment. If Sun hired another developer to work on Roller, that
individual would have to earn his or her karma in the usual way.
that sounds right to me. Dave was basically the start of the community,
but I joined just like anyone else and if someone else from Sun wanted
to contribute they would go through the same process.
The goal of an ASF project is to create the software that the members
of the PMC want to use in their own projects. We do want to attract
new users, because that's how we recruit new PMC members, but users
are a means to an end.
at this point i am unsure of what this has to do with our release
process. i think we would all agree that our goal is to provide a
valuable product for the people who use Roller. i'm not sure i
understand exactly how the PMC fits into that, but in any case my only
goal is to provide quality blogging software. personally, my motives
are inspired by blogs.sun.com, but not limited to or entirely controlled
by blogs.sun.com.
-- Allen
-Ted.
