On Jan 23, 2007, at 4:17 AM, Ian McNulty wrote:
Let's try a slightly different tack. Tailor-made is what we're talking about here.Tailor-made suits fit like a glove and cost more than most of us can afford.There was a time when that was all there was, and tailor shops on street corner were as common as greengrocers. But tailor-made suits were so expensive that most ordinary working people bought only one of two in a lifetime. Sunday-Best they used to call it. Preserved in mothballs in the wardrobe and only ever worn for church. Of course for top-drawer executives it was different. But then it always is.When the first off-the peg chain stores started appearing on the High Street, almost everybody was appalled. First into battle were the tailors in their corner shops.How can one size fit everybody? Well, of course it can't.The great leap forward - the Blue Ocean thinking outside the box - was to produce a carefully banded range of sizes, to fit most of the people most of the time."But then no size will ever fit anybody," was the next outraged cry. Well of course they can't. Never could. Never would. And still don't!The trick was to produce suit designs where it doesn't really matter. Pile them high and bang them out at prices everyone could afford. Making the leap from fitting some of the people all of the time to fitting most of the people most of the time was all it took to turn a whole industry completely upside down.The average tailor on the average corner quickly lost the plot. The master tailors in Saville Row upped their prices even more.Personally I thing that's all very sad. But you can't stop progress. That's the way all technology goes. One-off automobiles for the aristos give way to Model T Ford's for the masses, putting average tailor-made manufacturers out of business and leaving a small niche of master-tailors servicing the extremely well-off who would never be caught dead in anything off-the-peg.If David is saying is that he wants to stay tailoring for the executives and is appalled at the idea of selling ill-fitting suits to the masses then no way would I want to knock that.
Except I didn't say that. Suits and software are a bit different.What I said is that whatever we try to do, there has to be a model for it and a plan to make it work.
I think it would be cool to go after the end-user who would never think of customizing OFBiz or paying for it. The question is, how do we get people to work on this as a derivative of OFBiz? What will be the incentive for analysts, developers, documentation writers, support personnel, etc?
Not that it's impossible either. There are a few open source groups doing packages oriented this way. Their funding model is usually similar to commercial software though, which is why they like the GPL license, or even worse the HPL, (onerous enough that some will need/ want to buy a commercial license).
So, in a community driven project that as the target audience how do we get people interested enough in working on it to design it, build it, document it, maintain it, and support it? On top of all of that, if we really want a lot of users we'll probably need to market it a bit too.
I never said I want to stay doing what I am. It's really not that great. I'm certainly not appalled at doing something different, though I do appreciate the dramatic effect of the phrase-ology. I did say that I don't know how to do that, especially in a community- driven project.
-David
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