Hi James, Paul, et al, I'm just as disappointed as the rest of you/us at the apparent lack of appropriate attention to the community part of the OpenNess of Ingres. PLEASE correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't perceive there's been anybody but CA and Ingres Corporation V2.0 who has/have done anything with Ingres to speak of in over 10 years. I'd have thought that putting Ingres out there into the Open Source Community would have sparked a group of people to step up and take over the source and community building. Clearly that hasn't happened. But rather than pine about it, I'm ready to do something...
First off, I'm fairly local to Ingres Corporate Hq, and I had a pretty damned good intro to their top brass last Wedensday night. So, I'm prepared to at least try and approach them head-on with a combination of vision, reason, and ambition to see this succeed. To that end, I think that your rather cogent rant, James, provides plenty of material to be the foundation of a visionary plan. I am asking each of us now to step forward and help complete a vision statement; what do we want/need? I am pleased to champion this for us. I'll set up a web page on Science Tools' web site where I can put documents for review. I'll email back about this shortly. Once done, I'd appreciate all of you beating the bushes in an effort to inform all interested parties to participate in a vision dialogue. Secondly, whether or not Ingres Corporation V 2.0 supports any or all of the vision, we can create our own community, and damned well should. Using the vision statement, we can then distribute workload among ourselves and get this community off the ground. I'm hoping I'm not alone in this - I don't want to be standing there all alone wondering where everybody is! For there to be a community, there has to be a core of visionary leaders who make it happen. Rather than complain about it, make your vision come to life through action.... Please take a moment as you read this to reply back; are YOU willing to do SOMETHING to help it happen. I'm all ears, Richard On Sat, 2 Dec 2006, James K. Lowden wrote: > > Paul J Stevens wrote: > > The exotic build process, the lack of support for cutting edge > > distros, the lack of an active -dev mailinglist, the lack of free > > documentation all speak of legacy at best, and lack of commitment to the > > FOSS strategy at worst. > > I'm afraid lack of commitment is not the worst that can be said, but the > best. > Here's a good measure: How can I discuss development issues with people > experienced with the code? > > If I begin at http://opensource.ingres.com/projects/ingres/DeveloperZone, > I note there is nothing there for developers. There's condescension, a > set of "expectations", the promise of "reward". Please. I get > expectations and rewards at my day job. > > Compare that to http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Developing_Mozilla. > Go ahead, I'll wait. > > Now, one question. Which is more complicated: a web browswer, or a > database? > > It's not hard to abandon something as broken as a web-based forum that > gets only a few messages a month anyway. It's not hard to make your > internal development mailing list public, to move your support -- is there > any? -- to a public mailing list. It's not hard to mirror public > discussions in a variety of technologies. And, judging from the volume of > messages I've seen, it's not hard to answer questions. All these things > happen every day on smaller projects with no paid staff. Look at > Postgres, at Firebird. > > Especially look at Mozilla, because that's the model. It took Mozilla > years of going it alone, fixing up the code, staying public-focussed, > before it attracted a community. > > I began to port Ingres to NetBSD not long after CA re-released it. I made > some progress, got some of it to compile. But when I had questions about > the semantics of atomic memory-object locking, there was no one to ask. > > I have to believe there are other qualified developers who are also > interested in Ingres, but are savvy enough not to put in their time until > they see a flock gathering. > > Are you listening, Ingres? I am the sound of one hand clapping. > > --jkl > _______________________________________________ > Users mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.ingres.com/mailman/listinfo/users > -- Richard Troy, Chief Scientist Science Tools Corporation 510-924-1363 or 202-747-1263 [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://ScienceTools.com/ _______________________________________________ Users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ingres.com/mailman/listinfo/users
