On Feb 6, 2007, at 4:56 PM, Jonathon -- Improov wrote:
I agree about the critical mass. That's the biggest reason I "bet my career on OFBiz" (in my boss' words) in the first place. I see many competent OFBiz engineers popping in an out of the MLs.Problem is I don't see many contributing back. Guess you're right about some of the "dark side" of open source projects.Do you think actively training/creating more OFBiz engineers will explode the rate of development of OFBiz? Or is that gonna further fuel the "take out without putting back in" syndrome?
From my years of experience with this I think the strongest factors to predict this are... well... actually I think my years of mistakes in trying to predict this have only taught me that you never know what will get someone to contribute.
It is necessary to have something to push you into spending enough time with OFBiz to get your head around it, and to have something that will keep you coming back to the project frequently.
If you want an inside view on one of my evil plans related to OFBiz: this is the reason why I'm not a big fan of releases or stabilized branches. In general people using those cannot effectively collaborate with people developing new stuff and contribute to the trunk.
Still, such releases are important for the long term success of the project, and hopefully we're getting to the point where we are really ready for that. Though I'm not totally convinced, we'll find out soon, because we are doing it! As has been discussed the release branch is coming around the end of March. The success scenario for that is that enough people use it to help back-patch bug fixes from the trunk, and in general maintain and stabilize it.
-David
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