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Pierre Smits

The future of OFBiz - Open Discussion

Hi All,

I invite you to join me and participate in an open discussion on the
functioning and future of OFbiz via a teleconference on March 13, 2014.

Share your thoughts and insights on how you feel it going and what you
would like to see addressed in the project. Plus, it is a great opportunity
to get to know your fellow community member better than just through
communications via mailing lists.

I have set up a conference space through www.freeconferencecall.com and
tried to find an optimum sweet spot for the time slot to convene this
teleconference that will minimise the inconvenience for most. Therefore I
have chosen to set the starting time at 14:30 AMS time. Please find below a
small overview of starting times in different timezones:

LocationLocal timeTime zoneUTC offsetLos
Angeles<http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=137> (U.S.A.
- California)Thursday, 13 March 2014,
06:30:00PDT<http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/na/pdt.html>UTC-7
hoursNew York <http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=179> (U.S.A.
- New York)Thursday, 13 March 2014,
09:30:00EDT<http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/na/edt.html>UTC-4
hoursLondon <http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=136> (United
Kingdom - England)Thursday, 13 March 2014,
13:30:00GMT<http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/eu/gmt.html>
UTCAmsterdam <http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=16>
(Netherlands)Thursday, 13 March 2014,
14:30:00CET<http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/eu/cet.html>UTC+1
hourMoscow <http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=166>
(Russia)Thursday,
13 March 2014, 17:30:00MSK<http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/eu/msk.html>UTC+4
hoursBangalore <http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=438> (India
- Karnataka)Thursday, 13 March 2014,
19:00:00IST<http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/asia/ist.html>UTC+5:30
hoursBangkok <http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=28>
(Thailand)Thursday, 13 March 2014,
20:30:00ICT<http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/asia/ict.html>UTC+7
hoursAuckland <http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=22> (New
Zealand)Friday, 14 March 2014,
02:30:00NZDT<http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/pacific/nzdt.html>UTC+13
hoursCorresponding UTC (GMT)Thursday, 13 March 2014, 13:30:00
Please find below some details about how to participate, but you can always
more info on the website of http://freeconferencecall.com

*Conference Invite Details* Instructions*From: [hidden email]
<[hidden email]>*

*Subject: * The Future of OFBiz - Open Discussion
*Date & time: * 2014-03-13 14:30 (GMT+01:00)
*Duration: * 2 hr.

*Notes: *

*Free Conference Call*
Conference Dial-in Number: +31 (0) 6 35205070 (Number in the Netherlands)
Participant Access Code: 779895#

<http://www.freeconferencecall.com/fcci/internationalnumbers.aspx?lang=NL&altlang=EN&phonenumber=+31%20(0)%206%2035205070>

When prompted enter the access code that has been assigned, followed by the
# key. Once connected to the conference, you will be able to talk and have
access to the touch tone commands listed below.

Participant Feature KeysExit - exit the callInstructions - conference
instructionsMute/Unmute - caller controlled muting

I hope to see you there.

With regards

Pierre Smits

*ORRTIZ.COM <http://www.orrtiz.com>*
Services & Solutions for Cloud-
Based Manufacturing, Professional
Services and Retail & Trade
http://www.orrtiz.com

JulienNicolas

Re: The future of OFBiz - Open Discussion

Hi Pierre,

It's a good idea.
Nomaka team will be there the next thursday.

Julien
Nomaka.fr

Le 07/03/2014 09:00, Pierre Smits a écrit :

> Hi All,
>
> I invite you to join me and participate in an open discussion on the
> functioning and future of OFbiz via a teleconference on March 13, 2014.
>
> Share your thoughts and insights on how you feel it going and what you
> would like to see addressed in the project. Plus, it is a great opportunity
> to get to know your fellow community member better than just through
> communications via mailing lists.
>
> I have set up a conference space through www.freeconferencecall.com and
> tried to find an optimum sweet spot for the time slot to convene this
> teleconference that will minimise the inconvenience for most. Therefore I
> have chosen to set the starting time at 14:30 AMS time. Please find below a
> small overview of starting times in different timezones:
>
> LocationLocal timeTime zoneUTC offsetLos
> Angeles<http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=137> (U.S.A.
> - California)Thursday, 13 March 2014,
> 06:30:00PDT<http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/na/pdt.html>UTC-7
> hoursNew York <http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=179> (U.S.A.
> - New York)Thursday, 13 March 2014,
> 09:30:00EDT<http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/na/edt.html>UTC-4
> hoursLondon <http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=136> (United
> Kingdom - England)Thursday, 13 March 2014,
> 13:30:00GMT<http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/eu/gmt.html>
> UTCAmsterdam <http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=16>
> (Netherlands)Thursday, 13 March 2014,
> 14:30:00CET<http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/eu/cet.html>UTC+1
> hourMoscow <http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=166>
> (Russia)Thursday,
> 13 March 2014, 17:30:00MSK<http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/eu/msk.html>UTC+4
> hoursBangalore <http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=438> (India
> - Karnataka)Thursday, 13 March 2014,
> 19:00:00IST<http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/asia/ist.html>UTC+5:30
> hoursBangkok <http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=28>
> (Thailand)Thursday, 13 March 2014,
> 20:30:00ICT<http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/asia/ict.html>UTC+7
> hoursAuckland <http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=22> (New
> Zealand)Friday, 14 March 2014,
> 02:30:00NZDT<http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/pacific/nzdt.html>UTC+13
> hoursCorresponding UTC (GMT)Thursday, 13 March 2014, 13:30:00
> Please find below some details about how to participate, but you can always
> more info on the website of http://freeconferencecall.com
>
> *Conference Invite Details* Instructions*From: [hidden email]
> <[hidden email]>*
>
> *Subject: * The Future of OFBiz - Open Discussion
> *Date & time: * 2014-03-13 14:30 (GMT+01:00)
> *Duration: * 2 hr.
>
> *Notes: *
>
> *Free Conference Call*
> Conference Dial-in Number: +31 (0) 6 35205070 (Number in the Netherlands)
> Participant Access Code: 779895#
>
>
>
> <http://www.freeconferencecall.com/fcci/internationalnumbers.aspx?lang=NL&altlang=EN&phonenumber=+31%20(0)%206%2035205070>
>
> When prompted enter the access code that has been assigned, followed by the
> # key. Once connected to the conference, you will be able to talk and have
> access to the touch tone commands listed below.
>
>
> Participant Feature KeysExit - exit the callInstructions - conference
> instructionsMute/Unmute - caller controlled muting
>
>
> I hope to see you there.
>
> With regards
>
> Pierre Smits
>
> *ORRTIZ.COM <http://www.orrtiz.com>*
> Services & Solutions for Cloud-
> Based Manufacturing, Professional
> Services and Retail & Trade
> http://www.orrtiz.com
>

Rong Nguyen

Re: The future of OFBiz - Open Discussion

This post was updated on .

Thank Pierre,
Great.
We are Ofbiz VietNam team.
We will contribute our ideas!

Rong Nguyen

Olbius JSC
Deliver highest business value
http://www.olbius.com/

Pierre Smits

Re: The future of OFBiz - Open Discussion

In reply to this post by Pierre Smits

Hi all,

If you should have any constraints regarding attendance (meaning not being
able to attend), please drop a message to the general OFBiz ML (
[hidden email]) with what you think should be addressed so that
others can be aware of this.

Regards,

Pierre Smits

*ORRTIZ.COM <http://www.orrtiz.com>*
Services & Solutions for Cloud-
Based Manufacturing, Professional
Services and Retail & Trade
http://www.orrtiz.com

Scott Gray-2

Re: The future of OFBiz - Open Discussion

In reply to this post by Pierre Smits

I won't be attending simply because it is organized by Pierre (and because the genesis of this meeting seems to have come from a very negative perspective). Those of you who are new to the community or who he is polite to may not be aware of how rude Pierre can be. While he does do some good work from time to time I believe his presence in the community causes more harm than good. He has almost continuously attacked or worked against the PMC for the last year or two and I simply have no interest in hearing anything he has to say any longer. Almost no one seems to remember that he told the ASF he would chair an OFBiz presence at an ApacheCon a year or so ago, it was advertised, calls for papers/talks were made and submitted and then not long before the conference... he disappeared with no explanation to anyone. PMC members were forced to attend the conference (that he organized without consulting the PMC at all) and chair in his place on short notice to maintain the credibility of the project. As far as I know he has never apologized to or thanked those who took his place and never offered an explanation, he simply reappeared 6 months later and carried on causing trouble as usual. I have a hard time believing Pierre will ever be a committer or core contributor to this project so long as he continues to spectacularly fail at working well with others (this is just my opinion, I'm only one voice of many in the community). While I believe he is a destructive force in the community, there is nothing I can do about that, everyone is pretty much free to do as they please. It's up to each and every one of you to decide what he brings to the table and interact with him accordingly.

People talk about PMC "hidden agendas" and other conspiracy theories but often the reality is that it can be difficult to find motivation to work on a project that is constantly critical of the work you do. When I joined this project there was very little infighting and contributing was a rewarding experience that earned you respect and praise from your peers. It's a warm fuzzy feeling that keeps you active at nights and on weekends working on something you're passionate about. For me, that passion is fast disappearing because of people like Pierre (he is certainly not the first but he is particularly vocal). It feels like I'm regularly reading critical emails from various community members, either of the way the project is run or the way the project is progressing. What I very rarely see is any action behind the talk; people suggest major changes and then carry on with their day. No one actually gets anything done. I'm sure some of you would replace the entire PMC given half the chance and that may seem like some great achievement, but eventually... you're going to have to actually do something tangible to keep the community happy and achieve the goals you speak of. If you're not doing anything tangible now, then you're as much a part of the problem as anyone else, take pause before you throw those stones. You're being critical of those who have stayed when others have come and gone, those who have contributed more unpaid hours than most.

How many of you can claim that you do the work in project that would match what you'd like to see from a committer or PMC member? There is absolutely nothing stopping you from making that type of contribution right now, so what is the issue?

For those of you who have an opinion but aren't actually doing anything tangible (commit reviews, patch reviews, ticket research, contributing designs and documentation), the brighter future of OFBiz starts with you. Be the change that you want to see, go and do something productive for the project instead of complaining about what others are not doing. Just to be clear, contributing to general discussions isn't much of a contribution, it's extremely rare that they result in anything positive actually happening.

Regards
Scott

On 7/03/2014, at 9:00 PM, Pierre Smits wrote:

Jacopo Cappellato-4

Re: The future of OFBiz - Open Discussion

I would like to mention that Pierre is the only one person in the history of the project that sent his remarks against the OFBiz PMC to the Board of the Apache Software Foundation, asking them to step-in and act versus the OFBiz PMC: he actually did it twice (2 years ago and again yesterday). Since his remarks were made of inaccurate information, baseless assertions, exaggerations, it was easy for the OFBiz PMC to clarify the situation with the Board.
However, besides being very annoying and distracting, these behaviors are against the OFBiz community's spirit: in fact we had very few persons acting like Pierre in the whole history of OFBiz.
If you are new to the project and you are reading or listening to Pierre's statements, please be aware of this information and put them in the right context.

Jacopo

On Mar 13, 2014, at 7:52 AM, Scott Gray <[hidden email]> wrote:

>
> I won't be attending simply because it is organized by Pierre (and because the genesis of this meeting seems to have come from a very negative perspective). Those of you who are new to the community or who he is polite to may not be aware of how rude Pierre can be. While he does do some good work from time to time I believe his presence in the community causes more harm than good. He has almost continuously attacked or worked against the PMC for the last year or two and I simply have no interest in hearing anything he has to say any longer. Almost no one seems to remember that he told the ASF he would chair an OFBiz presence at an ApacheCon a year or so ago, it was advertised, calls for papers/talks were made and submitted and then not long before the conference... he disappeared with no explanation to anyone. PMC members were forced to attend the conference (that he organized without consulting the PMC at all) and chair in his place on short notice to maintain the credibility of the project. As far as I know he has never apologized to or thanked those who took his place and never offered an explanation, he simply reappeared 6 months later and carried on causing trouble as usual. I have a hard time believing Pierre will ever be a committer or core contributor to this project so long as he continues to spectacularly fail at working well with others (this is just my opinion, I'm only one voice of many in the community). While I believe he is a destructive force in the community, there is nothing I can do about that, everyone is pretty much free to do as they please. It's up to each and every one of you to decide what he brings to the table and interact with him accordingly.
>
> People talk about PMC "hidden agendas" and other conspiracy theories but often the reality is that it can be difficult to find motivation to work on a project that is constantly critical of the work you do. When I joined this project there was very little infighting and contributing was a rewarding experience that earned you respect and praise from your peers. It's a warm fuzzy feeling that keeps you active at nights and on weekends working on something you're passionate about. For me, that passion is fast disappearing because of people like Pierre (he is certainly not the first but he is particularly vocal). It feels like I'm regularly reading critical emails from various community members, either of the way the project is run or the way the project is progressing. What I very rarely see is any action behind the talk; people suggest major changes and then carry on with their day. No one actually gets anything done. I'm sure some of you would replace the entire PMC given half the chance and that may seem like some great achievement, but eventually... you're going to have to actually do something tangible to keep the community happy and achieve the goals you speak of. If you're not doing anything tangible now, then you're as much a part of the problem as anyone else, take pause before you throw those stones. You're being critical of those who have stayed when others have come and gone, those who have contributed more unpaid hours than most.
>
> How many of you can claim that you do the work in project that would match what you'd like to see from a committer or PMC member? There is absolutely nothing stopping you from making that type of contribution right now, so what is the issue?
>
> For those of you who have an opinion but aren't actually doing anything tangible (commit reviews, patch reviews, ticket research, contributing designs and documentation), the brighter future of OFBiz starts with you. Be the change that you want to see, go and do something productive for the project instead of complaining about what others are not doing. Just to be clear, contributing to general discussions isn't much of a contribution, it's extremely rare that they result in anything positive actually happening.
>
> Regards
> Scott
>
>
> On 7/03/2014, at 9:00 PM, Pierre Smits wrote:
>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> I invite you to join me and participate in an open discussion on the
>> functioning and future of OFbiz via a teleconference on March 13, 2014.
>>
>> Share your thoughts and insights on how you feel it going and what you
>> would like to see addressed in the project. Plus, it is a great opportunity
>> to get to know your fellow community member better than just through
>> communications via mailing lists.
>>
>> I have set up a conference space through www.freeconferencecall.com and
>> tried to find an optimum sweet spot for the time slot to convene this
>> teleconference that will minimise the inconvenience for most. Therefore I
>> have chosen to set the starting time at 14:30 AMS time. Please find below a
>> small overview of starting times in different timezones:
>>
>> LocationLocal timeTime zoneUTC offsetLos
>> Angeles<http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=137> (U.S.A.
>> - California)Thursday, 13 March 2014,
>> 06:30:00PDT<http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/na/pdt.html>UTC-7
>> hoursNew York <http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=179> (U.S.A.
>> - New York)Thursday, 13 March 2014,
>> 09:30:00EDT<http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/na/edt.html>UTC-4
>> hoursLondon <http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=136> (United
>> Kingdom - England)Thursday, 13 March 2014,
>> 13:30:00GMT<http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/eu/gmt.html>
>> UTCAmsterdam <http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=16>
>> (Netherlands)Thursday, 13 March 2014,
>> 14:30:00CET<http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/eu/cet.html>UTC+1
>> hourMoscow <http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=166>
>> (Russia)Thursday,
>> 13 March 2014, 17:30:00MSK<http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/eu/msk.html>UTC+4
>> hoursBangalore <http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=438> (India
>> - Karnataka)Thursday, 13 March 2014,
>> 19:00:00IST<http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/asia/ist.html>UTC+5:30
>> hoursBangkok <http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=28>
>> (Thailand)Thursday, 13 March 2014,
>> 20:30:00ICT<http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/asia/ict.html>UTC+7
>> hoursAuckland <http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=22> (New
>> Zealand)Friday, 14 March 2014,
>> 02:30:00NZDT<http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/pacific/nzdt.html>UTC+13
>> hoursCorresponding UTC (GMT)Thursday, 13 March 2014, 13:30:00
>> Please find below some details about how to participate, but you can always
>> more info on the website of http://freeconferencecall.com
>>
>> *Conference Invite Details* Instructions*From: [hidden email]
>> <[hidden email]>*
>>
>> *Subject: * The Future of OFBiz - Open Discussion
>> *Date & time: * 2014-03-13 14:30 (GMT+01:00)
>> *Duration: * 2 hr.
>>
>> *Notes: *
>>
>> *Free Conference Call*
>> Conference Dial-in Number: +31 (0) 6 35205070 (Number in the Netherlands)
>> Participant Access Code: 779895#
>>
>>
>>
>> <http://www.freeconferencecall.com/fcci/internationalnumbers.aspx?lang=NL&altlang=EN&phonenumber=+31%20(0)%206%2035205070>
>>
>> When prompted enter the access code that has been assigned, followed by the
>> # key. Once connected to the conference, you will be able to talk and have
>> access to the touch tone commands listed below.
>>
>>
>> Participant Feature KeysExit - exit the callInstructions - conference
>> instructionsMute/Unmute - caller controlled muting
>>
>>
>> I hope to see you there.
>>
>> With regards
>>
>> Pierre Smits
>>
>> *ORRTIZ.COM <http://www.orrtiz.com>*
>> Services & Solutions for Cloud-
>> Based Manufacturing, Professional
>> Services and Retail & Trade
>> http://www.orrtiz.com
>
>

David E. Jones-2

Re: The future of OFBiz - Open Discussion

In reply to this post by Scott Gray-2

Thank you Scott. This is an inspiring reminder of how things actually work in the ASF. Apache OFBiz is not managed top-down, it is managed bottom-up based on actual effort and merit. Discussions really only matter if they lead up to an effort that results in actual code/doc/etc changes.

Pierre's message to the Board is a great example of misunderstanding this guiding principle, so I responded in more detail in that thread, but just wanted to throw in my +1 for what you wrote here.

-David

On Mar 12, 2014, at 11:52 PM, Scott Gray <[hidden email]> wrote:

Paul Piper

Re: The future of OFBiz - Open Discussion

I wouldn't necessarily say that what Pierre brings up is unjust, but understandably this is a heated discussion. I would bring it down to two few core points. Obviously this will offend some, but please bare with me:

1. Commitment starts with recognition
I think that the community has a problem with recognizing contributions properly. I am running a company and thus lack the time to review code on a daily basis, over the years I have, however, contributed thousands of hours to this community. I represented OFBiz as a speaker at the ApacheCon, wrote articles to magazines, committed large parts of code and bugfixes (among them since 2006: Apache Solr integration, SEO Updates, Axis2 integration, etc.), committed bugfixes, added wiki documents and helped wherever I could (not even counting in all the free workshops and presentations i have given to people interested in the topic). And though I am only a single person, I think I can say that it went largely unnoticed. From a business perspective i would put it as a "bad investment", but we continue to do it for the love of the project. I noticed that I am not alone in this, other people, like Angus Gow or Rupert Howell are also examples I could name right away that haven't received enough recognition for their contributions.

2. Not everybody in the PMC is active or invested in the community
The way I understand the argument is that the OFBiz Community is structured into groups (contributors, committers, pmc), where personal commitment gets you higher in the ranks. This is not the case for the PMC, however. Just glancing over the wiki page, there are several people listed that haven't been active in recent months or sometimes even years. Just to name a few:

* Ashish Vijaywargiya (most active till 2010)
* Anil Patel (most active till 2010)
* Vikas Mayur
* Paul Foxworthy
* David Welton (probably supported the project in the early stages)
* Yoav Shapira (probably supported the project in the early stages)
* Joseph Eckard
* Bilgin Ibryam

Andrew Zeneski has been the last addition to the committee in 2013, before him there hasn't been any change since 2007. The same argument could be made for a few people who are not really invested into the community any longer, push their own products, or have moved on to new projects.

This is quite uncommon for a project that is based on personal commitment and begs the question why a committee remains static whereas clearly the project moves forward.

Jacques Le Roux

Re: The future of OFBiz - Open Discussion

Administrator

Paul,

Since I was the last one to update the PMC wiki page, let me correct some points in your point 2

Though less, Paul Foxworthy is still active. You can spot some of his pertinent comments in both the MLs and Jira issues from time to time. We should
always remember that quantity is not quality...

>Andrew Zeneski has been the last addition to the committee in 2013
I don't know how you came to this result. It's clearly specified that Andrew was a co-founder of the project in 2001 and hence part of the PMC the 1st day of the Apache era.

For the rest, I let people defend themselves... if they want...

Note that I made a mistake for Erwan and Bruno, they are still part of the PMC. There is indeed no emeritus status for PMC member. The OFBiz PMC could though create one, each PMC is able to create its own policies:http://www.apache.org/dev/pmc.html#emeritus

Jacques

Le 14/03/2014 11:00, Paul Piper a écrit :

> I wouldn't necessarily say that what Pierre brings up is unjust, but
> understandably this is a heated discussion. I would bring it down to two few
> core points. Obviously this will offend some, but please bare with me:
>
>
> 1. Commitment starts with recognition
> I think that the community has a problem with recognizing contributions
> properly. I am running a company and thus lack the time to review code on a
> daily basis, over the years I have, however, contributed thousands of hours
> to this community. I represented OFBiz as a speaker at the ApacheCon, wrote
> articles to magazines, committed large parts of code and bugfixes (among
> them since 2006: Apache Solr integration, SEO Updates, Axis2 integration,
> etc.), committed bugfixes, added wiki documents and helped wherever I could
> (not even counting in all the free workshops and presentations i have given
> to people interested in the topic). And though I am only a single person, I
> think I can say that it went largely unnoticed. From a business perspective
> i would put it as a "bad investment", but we continue to do it for the love
> of the project. I noticed that I am not alone in this, other people, like
> Angus Gow or Rupert Howell are also examples I could name right away that
> haven't received enough recognition for their contributions.
>
>
>
> 2. Not everybody in the PMC is active or invested in the community
> The way I understand the argument is that the OFBiz Community is structured
> into groups (contributors, committers, pmc), where personal commitment gets
> you higher in the ranks. This is not the case for the PMC, however. Just
> glancing over the wiki page, there are several people listed that haven't
> been active in recent months or sometimes even years. Just to name a few:
>
> * Ashish Vijaywargiya (most active till 2010)
> * Anil Patel (most active till 2010)
> * Vikas Mayur
> * Paul Foxworthy
> * David Welton (probably supported the project in the early stages)
> * Yoav Shapira (probably supported the project in the early stages)
> * Joseph Eckard
> * Bilgin Ibryam
>
> Andrew Zeneski has been the last addition to the committee in 2013, before
> him there hasn't been any change since 2007. The same argument could be made
> for a few people who are not really invested into the community any longer,
> push their own products, or have moved on to new projects.
>
> This is quite uncommon for a project that is based on personal commitment
> and begs the question why a committee remains static whereas clearly the
> project moves forward.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> View this message in context: http://ofbiz.135035.n4.nabble.com/The-future-of-OFBiz-Open-Discussion-tp4648865p4649277.html
> Sent from the OFBiz - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>

Paul Piper

Re: The future of OFBiz - Open Discussion

Jacques,

Thanks for clarifying Andrew's status, I must have misread the wiki page. Then we are down to Paul Foxworthy being the last person having been added in 2012. The rest of the argument stands as it was.

I would also like to clarify that my post is in no effect meant to be offensive to anyone. I think that there is an unsatisfactory status quo and I brought it down to two points. Clearly there are members of the PMC who I have deep respect for and who are very active. This doesn't change the fact, however, that the PMC has been very protective over their own status and seldom chooses to update the list of PMC members, committers and contributors. I would also like to point out, that over the years I have had the impression that it is easier for those connected to HWM have a higher chance of becoming either committers or members of the pmc. It may be only a personal impression, but it is a very sour one. This being a project driven by personal investment, it is this that i find worthy of a discussion.

Lastly, I have to point out that the personal attack on Pierre is also a bit uncalled. He brought up some interesting points and chose valid methods to do so, one being this message list, the other being the asf. I don't think that he personally offended a single person, so perhaps we can keep it low on that?

hans_bakker

Re: The future of OFBiz - Open Discussion

In reply to this post by Paul Piper

Paul,

Well said, that is the key problem:
many people people work very hard for the project and do not get any
recognition for it in what ever form.

Not having the key contributors on the ofbiz site main page is an example.

Regards,
Hans

On 14/03/14 17:00, Paul Piper wrote:

Jacopo Cappellato-4

Re: The future of OFBiz - Open Discussion

In reply to this post by Paul Piper

Hi Paul,

please see inline:

On Mar 14, 2014, at 11:00 AM, Paul Piper <[hidden email]> wrote:

> I wouldn't necessarily say that what Pierre brings up is unjust, but
> understandably this is a heated discussion. I would bring it down to two few
> core points. Obviously this will offend some, but please bare with me:
>
>
> 1. Commitment starts with recognition

I completely disagree that the problem is that the PMC/committers group is not noticing contributors; the problem is instead that the current admission bar that we have set, is probably too high for this community. It is true that we are not inviting enough committers and PMC members (and in fact I think we should find ways to fix this, and we have started a preliminary discussion about this) but just because, with the current rules, there are not good candidates. In my opinion, we will have to work at ways to facilitate the growth of new volunteers and we will also have to lower the admission bar by setting up stricter reviews to counterbalance the risk of affecting the quality of commits.
As regards your specific position, since this seems to be your main concern/complain, please see below:

> I think that the community has a problem with recognizing contributions
> properly. I am running a company and thus lack the time to review code on a
> daily basis, over the years I have, however, contributed thousands of hours
> to this community. I represented OFBiz as a speaker at the ApacheCon, wrote
> articles to magazines, committed large parts of code and bugfixes (among
> them since 2006: Apache Solr integration, SEO Updates, Axis2 integration,
> etc.), committed bugfixes, added wiki documents and helped wherever I could
> (not even counting in all the free workshops and presentations i have given
> to people interested in the topic). And though I am only a single person, I
> think I can say that it went largely unnoticed.

Here is the whole list of commits in which you have some credit (over a few years):

rev. 1423117: fix for one label
rev. 1304205: new category trail method (OFBIZ-4580); no ootb code has ever used it
rev. 728455: minor correction done by Jacques based on your bug report to the user list
rev. 1234014: minor: "Thanks to Paul Piper for his help about this last point, by pointing about XSD reference."
rev. 1430332: German labels for the Accounting application (OFBIZ-5108)

We all appreciate your help and I understand that even small contributions like these can initially take a lot of time and effort but unfortunately these are still considered minor contributions by many; I guess this is the reason no one in the PMC has proposed you as a candidate for being invited as committer so far; but please go on, work hard and keep a positive and non-conflictual attitude and I am sure that you will be noticed.

As regards your contributions to Jira (uncommitted code, code reviews and misc comments), here is the whole list of what we have in our records:

* OFBIZ-4581 (2011/11): rejected/not a problem
* OFBIZ-4666 (2012/01): rejected/invalid
* OFBIZ-3877 (2012/11): one comment
* OFBIZ-5037 (2012/11): a bug report
* OFBIZ-5312/OFBIZ-4535 (2013/11): initial requirements and comments/reviews; up to now only the experimental SEO branch was affected (the task history is a huge mess)
* OFBIZ-5042 (2012/11): Solr component; no code has been committed yet but I have a series of concerns about this work that I will soon try to fix by committing some code changes to the specialpurpose/lucene component in order to enhance it to support also Solr
* OFBIZ-4769 (2012/12): one comment
* OFBIZ-4833 (2012/12): one comment
* OFBIZ-5109 (2012/12): comments
* OFBIZ-3972 (2013/01): one comment
* OFBIZ-5248 (2013/06): one comment
* OFBIZ-5040 (2014/01): discussion about UI technologies in OFBiz

Again, in my opinion the above activity, even if valuable for the project, cannot be considered very high.

In addition to this, you have never participated to voting threads, nor helped testing new releases and these are important aspects of the project.

> From a business perspective
> i would put it as a "bad investment", but we continue to do it for the love
> of the project. I noticed that I am not alone in this, other people, like
> Angus Gow

I could just find one email from him, no activity in Jira nor in the commit history.

> or Rupert Howell

Here are some stats for Rupert (activity since 2007):

* OFBIZ-721: unfinished work, never committed
* OFBIZ-707: unfinished work, never committed
* OFBIZ-699: reported a broken link in the OFBiz website
* OFBIZ-5307: bug report resolved as "not a problem"
* OFBIZ-5282: reviews and comments
* rev. 1001789: "Auto-complete for dropdowns"

> are also examples I could name right away that
> haven't received enough recognition for their contributions.

Again, do not get me wrong: I greatly appreciate the help you all are providing and I want to personally thank you for each piece of contribution; but I still think that this level of activity may make impractical to invite you as contributors (or at least this has been true with the current rules).

>
> 2. Not everybody in the PMC is active or invested in the community

This is a completely different topic that doesn't affect in any way our decisions about new committers.
I am not against discussing the idea to ask old inactive committers and PMC members to resign from their role, for the sake of keeping our lists clear (and I also mentioned this in the past to the PMC).
However this is a super low priority and maybe also a bad idea if you look at this according to the spirit that inspired these rules at the ASF:
* if you do enough work and the PMC votes you to become a committer or PMC of the project, then you deserve to have your name listed forever in the committers/PMC group, unless you ask to resign
* in this way the project officially recognizes that an individual plays or has played (at least in a period of the life of the project) an important role
* there is no upper limit to the number of committers and PMC members, so the inactive ones do not cause any harm to the new potential candidates

In the analysis below there are few errors that have been pointed out by others, so I will not comment further.

Kind regards,

Jacopo

> The way I understand the argument is that the OFBiz Community is structured
> into groups (contributors, committers, pmc), where personal commitment gets
> you higher in the ranks. This is not the case for the PMC, however. Just
> glancing over the wiki page, there are several people listed that haven't
> been active in recent months or sometimes even years. Just to name a few:
>
> * Ashish Vijaywargiya (most active till 2010)
> * Anil Patel (most active till 2010)
> * Vikas Mayur
> * Paul Foxworthy
> * David Welton (probably supported the project in the early stages)
> * Yoav Shapira (probably supported the project in the early stages)
> * Joseph Eckard
> * Bilgin Ibryam
>
> Andrew Zeneski has been the last addition to the committee in 2013, before
> him there hasn't been any change since 2007. The same argument could be made
> for a few people who are not really invested into the community any longer,
> push their own products, or have moved on to new projects.
>
> This is quite uncommon for a project that is based on personal commitment
> and begs the question why a committee remains static whereas clearly the
> project moves forward.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> View this message in context: http://ofbiz.135035.n4.nabble.com/The-future-of-OFBiz-Open-Discussion-tp4648865p4649277.html
> Sent from the OFBiz - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

Scott Gray-2

Re: The future of OFBiz - Open Discussion

In reply to this post by Paul Piper

Hi Paul,

I don't like personal attacks either but I felt it necessary to make those comments given Pierre's history. I personally see it more as a defensive action than an offensive one. The fact is he has in the past been rude, insulted plenty of long time contributors and attempted to cause disharmony within the project using baseless accusations. The recent chain of events appears to be another round of the same unnecessary behavior and I felt it necessary to provide the bigger picture to those who may be unaware. I can easily provide links to the various threads if anyone wants to disagree with what I've said but they aren't hard to find on your own (particularly around April/May 2012).

Regards
Scott

On 15/03/2014, at 1:04 AM, Paul Piper wrote:

>
> Lastly, I have to point out that the personal attack on Pierre is also a bit
> uncalled. He brought up some interesting points and chose valid methods to
> do so, one being this message list, the other being the asf. I don't think
> that he personally offended a single person, so perhaps we can keep it low
> on that?

Paul Piper

Re: The future of OFBiz - Open Discussion

In reply to this post by Jacopo Cappellato-4

@jacopo: Thanks for taking the time to so carefully go over the activity. I hope you do realize that though I am not always personally submitting things, a lot is sponsored by my company. It is precisely your attitude that will eventually break the community

Jacques Le Roux

Re: The future of OFBiz - Open Discussion

Administrator

In reply to this post by Jacopo Cappellato-4

Hi Jacopo,

I can't answer for Paul, but it seems he is expressing something someone already did years ago: Ruth
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBADMIN/Apache+OFBiz+PMC+%28Project+Management+Committee%29+Members+and+Committers#comment-9373832

Then David rightly said
<<There is always a possibility that people who have contributed a lot, in any form of contribution, haven't been noticed by a PMC member. If that is
the case, and someone else notices then please notify the PMC on the private mailing list ([hidden email]).>>

This is not the PMC ML, but I think there are no problems telling some facts which went unnoticed in your list about Paul and the persons he
mentioned. This because I feel certain persons who have been active but not much with code have not been rewarded enough for their work. I mean if
they would be interested to be more involved in the community as committers or even PMC members. BTW I/we did not answer to one Ruth's question: can a
non committer be a PMC member? I did not find anything clear reading
https://www.apache.org/dev/contributors.html
https://www.apache.org/dev/new-committers-guide
and notably https://www.apache.org/dev/pmc.html#audience
But I believe it would be possible if the PMC members agree on.

For instance seen from a commit POV, Rupert did not much. But after Jonathon (remember him?) began to write the 1st book on OFBiz and sort of gave up,
Packt contacted Rupert and he took the burden to review what Jonathon did (1st half of the book), fixed or helped to fix the bugs Jonathan was ranting
about in this 1st part of the book (instead of doing the right things: fixing them) and completed the book. I know that well. I was then working with
Rupert on a project and reviewed the book. We could say that this was his own initiative and he was payed for it. Well, sure... but I'm also sure it
was not his only motivation. And to be frank, I'm not sure it's a good way to make money in respect of the time passed. Also I made what was needed to
be sure 5% of the profits are going to the ASF.

The same is somehow true for Ruth and Sharan who wrote books which are helping OFBiz users everyday.
Paul also made efforts to spread the word about OFBiz, by doing many OFBiz presentations in Germany, one in the Europe Apachecon, and wrote articles
on OFBiz , one in a German Java magazine.
The guy from the Neogia community are also indirectly doing efforts to make OFBiz better known in France. BTW, a new French association should help
soon in this direction.

Those are only examples I know and I can speak about, and at the end I can agree that those efforts are not the same than reviewing, testing and
committing (which means responsibility and a lot of time) code. But still, I believe we underweight them.

I could not refrain to throw my 2 cts

Jacques

Le 16/03/2014 08:55, Jacopo Cappellato a écrit :

> Hi Paul,
>
> please see inline:
>
> On Mar 14, 2014, at 11:00 AM, Paul Piper <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>> I wouldn't necessarily say that what Pierre brings up is unjust, but
>> understandably this is a heated discussion. I would bring it down to two few
>> core points. Obviously this will offend some, but please bare with me:
>>
>>
>> 1. Commitment starts with recognition
> I completely disagree that the problem is that the PMC/committers group is not noticing contributors; the problem is instead that the current admission bar that we have set, is probably too high for this community. It is true that we are not inviting enough committers and PMC members (and in fact I think we should find ways to fix this, and we have started a preliminary discussion about this) but just because, with the current rules, there are not good candidates. In my opinion, we will have to work at ways to facilitate the growth of new volunteers and we will also have to lower the admission bar by setting up stricter reviews to counterbalance the risk of affecting the quality of commits.
> As regards your specific position, since this seems to be your main concern/complain, please see below:
>
>> I think that the community has a problem with recognizing contributions
>> properly. I am running a company and thus lack the time to review code on a
>> daily basis, over the years I have, however, contributed thousands of hours
>> to this community. I represented OFBiz as a speaker at the ApacheCon, wrote
>> articles to magazines, committed large parts of code and bugfixes (among
>> them since 2006: Apache Solr integration, SEO Updates, Axis2 integration,
>> etc.), committed bugfixes, added wiki documents and helped wherever I could
>> (not even counting in all the free workshops and presentations i have given
>> to people interested in the topic). And though I am only a single person, I
>> think I can say that it went largely unnoticed.
> Here is the whole list of commits in which you have some credit (over a few years):
>
> rev. 1423117: fix for one label
> rev. 1304205: new category trail method (OFBIZ-4580); no ootb code has ever used it
> rev. 728455: minor correction done by Jacques based on your bug report to the user list
> rev. 1234014: minor: "Thanks to Paul Piper for his help about this last point, by pointing about XSD reference."
> rev. 1430332: German labels for the Accounting application (OFBIZ-5108)
>
> We all appreciate your help and I understand that even small contributions like these can initially take a lot of time and effort but unfortunately these are still considered minor contributions by many; I guess this is the reason no one in the PMC has proposed you as a candidate for being invited as committer so far; but please go on, work hard and keep a positive and non-conflictual attitude and I am sure that you will be noticed.
>
> As regards your contributions to Jira (uncommitted code, code reviews and misc comments), here is the whole list of what we have in our records:
>
> * OFBIZ-4581 (2011/11): rejected/not a problem
> * OFBIZ-4666 (2012/01): rejected/invalid
> * OFBIZ-3877 (2012/11): one comment
> * OFBIZ-5037 (2012/11): a bug report
> * OFBIZ-5312/OFBIZ-4535 (2013/11): initial requirements and comments/reviews; up to now only the experimental SEO branch was affected (the task history is a huge mess)
> * OFBIZ-5042 (2012/11): Solr component; no code has been committed yet but I have a series of concerns about this work that I will soon try to fix by committing some code changes to the specialpurpose/lucene component in order to enhance it to support also Solr
> * OFBIZ-4769 (2012/12): one comment
> * OFBIZ-4833 (2012/12): one comment
> * OFBIZ-5109 (2012/12): comments
> * OFBIZ-3972 (2013/01): one comment
> * OFBIZ-5248 (2013/06): one comment
> * OFBIZ-5040 (2014/01): discussion about UI technologies in OFBiz
>
> Again, in my opinion the above activity, even if valuable for the project, cannot be considered very high.
>
> In addition to this, you have never participated to voting threads, nor helped testing new releases and these are important aspects of the project.
>
>> From a business perspective
>> i would put it as a "bad investment", but we continue to do it for the love
>> of the project. I noticed that I am not alone in this, other people, like
>> Angus Gow
> I could just find one email from him, no activity in Jira nor in the commit history.
>
>> or Rupert Howell
> Here are some stats for Rupert (activity since 2007):
>
> * OFBIZ-721: unfinished work, never committed
> * OFBIZ-707: unfinished work, never committed
> * OFBIZ-699: reported a broken link in the OFBiz website
> * OFBIZ-5307: bug report resolved as "not a problem"
> * OFBIZ-5282: reviews and comments
> * rev. 1001789: "Auto-complete for dropdowns"
>
>> are also examples I could name right away that
>> haven't received enough recognition for their contributions.
> Again, do not get me wrong: I greatly appreciate the help you all are providing and I want to personally thank you for each piece of contribution; but I still think that this level of activity may make impractical to invite you as contributors (or at least this has been true with the current rules).
>
>> 2. Not everybody in the PMC is active or invested in the community
> This is a completely different topic that doesn't affect in any way our decisions about new committers.
> I am not against discussing the idea to ask old inactive committers and PMC members to resign from their role, for the sake of keeping our lists clear (and I also mentioned this in the past to the PMC).
> However this is a super low priority and maybe also a bad idea if you look at this according to the spirit that inspired these rules at the ASF:
> * if you do enough work and the PMC votes you to become a committer or PMC of the project, then you deserve to have your name listed forever in the committers/PMC group, unless you ask to resign
> * in this way the project officially recognizes that an individual plays or has played (at least in a period of the life of the project) an important role
> * there is no upper limit to the number of committers and PMC members, so the inactive ones do not cause any harm to the new potential candidates
>
> In the analysis below there are few errors that have been pointed out by others, so I will not comment further.
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Jacopo
>
>> The way I understand the argument is that the OFBiz Community is structured
>> into groups (contributors, committers, pmc), where personal commitment gets
>> you higher in the ranks. This is not the case for the PMC, however. Just
>> glancing over the wiki page, there are several people listed that haven't
>> been active in recent months or sometimes even years. Just to name a few:
>>
>> * Ashish Vijaywargiya (most active till 2010)
>> * Anil Patel (most active till 2010)
>> * Vikas Mayur
>> * Paul Foxworthy
>> * David Welton (probably supported the project in the early stages)
>> * Yoav Shapira (probably supported the project in the early stages)
>> * Joseph Eckard
>> * Bilgin Ibryam
>>
>> Andrew Zeneski has been the last addition to the committee in 2013, before
>> him there hasn't been any change since 2007. The same argument could be made
>> for a few people who are not really invested into the community any longer,
>> push their own products, or have moved on to new projects.
>>
>> This is quite uncommon for a project that is based on personal commitment
>> and begs the question why a committee remains static whereas clearly the
>> project moves forward.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> View this message in context: http://ofbiz.135035.n4.nabble.com/The-future-of-OFBiz-Open-Discussion-tp4648865p4649277.html
>> Sent from the OFBiz - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
>

Paul Piper

Re: The future of OFBiz - Open Discussion

@jacques: Thanks for pointing this out. I share the belief that Ruth's contributions have also fallen under the radar. She put an enormous effort into writing her book and gave countless ours of free support to outsiders. She additionally tried her best to create a platform to sell third-party applications for apache ofbiz.

While at it: BJ Freeman is another one who isn't even mentioned on wiki pages, despite his years of effort.

Jacques Le Roux

Re: The future of OFBiz - Open Discussion

Administrator

In reply to this post by Jacques Le Roux

To be more clear, the question Ruth then asked was:

<<Dare I ask: can a non-committer be a PMC member? Aside from the ASF members, I don't see a single PMC member who is not a committer. How would a
non-committer gain PMC membership?>>

I/we then completly forgot to answer her :/

Jacques

Le 16/03/2014 14:29, Jacques Le Roux a écrit :

> Hi Jacopo,
>
> I can't answer for Paul, but it seems he is expressing something someone already did years ago: Ruth
> https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBADMIN/Apache+OFBiz+PMC+%28Project+Management+Committee%29+Members+and+Committers#comment-9373832
>
> Then David rightly said
> <<There is always a possibility that people who have contributed a lot, in any form of contribution, haven't been noticed by a PMC member. If that
> is the case, and someone else notices then please notify the PMC on the private mailing list ([hidden email]).>>
>
> This is not the PMC ML, but I think there are no problems telling some facts which went unnoticed in your list about Paul and the persons he
> mentioned. This because I feel certain persons who have been active but not much with code have not been rewarded enough for their work. I mean if
> they would be interested to be more involved in the community as committers or even PMC members. BTW I/we did not answer to one Ruth's question: can
> a non committer be a PMC member? I did not find anything clear reading
> https://www.apache.org/dev/contributors.html
> https://www.apache.org/dev/new-committers-guide
> and notably https://www.apache.org/dev/pmc.html#audience
> But I believe it would be possible if the PMC members agree on.
>
> For instance seen from a commit POV, Rupert did not much. But after Jonathon (remember him?) began to write the 1st book on OFBiz and sort of gave
> up, Packt contacted Rupert and he took the burden to review what Jonathon did (1st half of the book), fixed or helped to fix the bugs Jonathan was
> ranting about in this 1st part of the book (instead of doing the right things: fixing them) and completed the book. I know that well. I was then
> working with Rupert on a project and reviewed the book. We could say that this was his own initiative and he was payed for it. Well, sure... but I'm
> also sure it was not his only motivation. And to be frank, I'm not sure it's a good way to make money in respect of the time passed. Also I made
> what was needed to be sure 5% of the profits are going to the ASF.
>
> The same is somehow true for Ruth and Sharan who wrote books which are helping OFBiz users everyday.
> Paul also made efforts to spread the word about OFBiz, by doing many OFBiz presentations in Germany, one in the Europe Apachecon, and wrote articles
> on OFBiz , one in a German Java magazine.
> The guy from the Neogia community are also indirectly doing efforts to make OFBiz better known in France. BTW, a new French association should help
> soon in this direction.
>
> Those are only examples I know and I can speak about, and at the end I can agree that those efforts are not the same than reviewing, testing and
> committing (which means responsibility and a lot of time) code. But still, I believe we underweight them.
>
> I could not refrain to throw my 2 cts
>
> Jacques
>
>
> Le 16/03/2014 08:55, Jacopo Cappellato a écrit :
>> Hi Paul,
>>
>> please see inline:
>>
>> On Mar 14, 2014, at 11:00 AM, Paul Piper <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>
>>> I wouldn't necessarily say that what Pierre brings up is unjust, but
>>> understandably this is a heated discussion. I would bring it down to two few
>>> core points. Obviously this will offend some, but please bare with me:
>>>
>>>
>>> 1. Commitment starts with recognition
>> I completely disagree that the problem is that the PMC/committers group is not noticing contributors; the problem is instead that the current
>> admission bar that we have set, is probably too high for this community. It is true that we are not inviting enough committers and PMC members (and
>> in fact I think we should find ways to fix this, and we have started a preliminary discussion about this) but just because, with the current rules,
>> there are not good candidates. In my opinion, we will have to work at ways to facilitate the growth of new volunteers and we will also have to
>> lower the admission bar by setting up stricter reviews to counterbalance the risk of affecting the quality of commits.
>> As regards your specific position, since this seems to be your main concern/complain, please see below:
>>
>>> I think that the community has a problem with recognizing contributions
>>> properly. I am running a company and thus lack the time to review code on a
>>> daily basis, over the years I have, however, contributed thousands of hours
>>> to this community. I represented OFBiz as a speaker at the ApacheCon, wrote
>>> articles to magazines, committed large parts of code and bugfixes (among
>>> them since 2006: Apache Solr integration, SEO Updates, Axis2 integration,
>>> etc.), committed bugfixes, added wiki documents and helped wherever I could
>>> (not even counting in all the free workshops and presentations i have given
>>> to people interested in the topic). And though I am only a single person, I
>>> think I can say that it went largely unnoticed.
>> Here is the whole list of commits in which you have some credit (over a few years):
>>
>> rev. 1423117: fix for one label
>> rev. 1304205: new category trail method (OFBIZ-4580); no ootb code has ever used it
>> rev. 728455: minor correction done by Jacques based on your bug report to the user list
>> rev. 1234014: minor: "Thanks to Paul Piper for his help about this last point, by pointing about XSD reference."
>> rev. 1430332: German labels for the Accounting application (OFBIZ-5108)
>>
>> We all appreciate your help and I understand that even small contributions like these can initially take a lot of time and effort but unfortunately
>> these are still considered minor contributions by many; I guess this is the reason no one in the PMC has proposed you as a candidate for being
>> invited as committer so far; but please go on, work hard and keep a positive and non-conflictual attitude and I am sure that you will be noticed.
>>
>> As regards your contributions to Jira (uncommitted code, code reviews and misc comments), here is the whole list of what we have in our records:
>>
>> * OFBIZ-4581 (2011/11): rejected/not a problem
>> * OFBIZ-4666 (2012/01): rejected/invalid
>> * OFBIZ-3877 (2012/11): one comment
>> * OFBIZ-5037 (2012/11): a bug report
>> * OFBIZ-5312/OFBIZ-4535 (2013/11): initial requirements and comments/reviews; up to now only the experimental SEO branch was affected (the task
>> history is a huge mess)
>> * OFBIZ-5042 (2012/11): Solr component; no code has been committed yet but I have a series of concerns about this work that I will soon try to fix
>> by committing some code changes to the specialpurpose/lucene component in order to enhance it to support also Solr
>> * OFBIZ-4769 (2012/12): one comment
>> * OFBIZ-4833 (2012/12): one comment
>> * OFBIZ-5109 (2012/12): comments
>> * OFBIZ-3972 (2013/01): one comment
>> * OFBIZ-5248 (2013/06): one comment
>> * OFBIZ-5040 (2014/01): discussion about UI technologies in OFBiz
>>
>> Again, in my opinion the above activity, even if valuable for the project, cannot be considered very high.
>>
>> In addition to this, you have never participated to voting threads, nor helped testing new releases and these are important aspects of the project.
>>
>>> From a business perspective
>>> i would put it as a "bad investment", but we continue to do it for the love
>>> of the project. I noticed that I am not alone in this, other people, like
>>> Angus Gow
>> I could just find one email from him, no activity in Jira nor in the commit history.
>>
>>> or Rupert Howell
>> Here are some stats for Rupert (activity since 2007):
>>
>> * OFBIZ-721: unfinished work, never committed
>> * OFBIZ-707: unfinished work, never committed
>> * OFBIZ-699: reported a broken link in the OFBiz website
>> * OFBIZ-5307: bug report resolved as "not a problem"
>> * OFBIZ-5282: reviews and comments
>> * rev. 1001789: "Auto-complete for dropdowns"
>>
>>> are also examples I could name right away that
>>> haven't received enough recognition for their contributions.
>> Again, do not get me wrong: I greatly appreciate the help you all are providing and I want to personally thank you for each piece of contribution;
>> but I still think that this level of activity may make impractical to invite you as contributors (or at least this has been true with the current
>> rules).
>>
>>> 2. Not everybody in the PMC is active or invested in the community
>> This is a completely different topic that doesn't affect in any way our decisions about new committers.
>> I am not against discussing the idea to ask old inactive committers and PMC members to resign from their role, for the sake of keeping our lists
>> clear (and I also mentioned this in the past to the PMC).
>> However this is a super low priority and maybe also a bad idea if you look at this according to the spirit that inspired these rules at the ASF:
>> * if you do enough work and the PMC votes you to become a committer or PMC of the project, then you deserve to have your name listed forever in the
>> committers/PMC group, unless you ask to resign
>> * in this way the project officially recognizes that an individual plays or has played (at least in a period of the life of the project) an
>> important role
>> * there is no upper limit to the number of committers and PMC members, so the inactive ones do not cause any harm to the new potential candidates
>>
>> In the analysis below there are few errors that have been pointed out by others, so I will not comment further.
>>
>> Kind regards,
>>
>> Jacopo
>>
>>> The way I understand the argument is that the OFBiz Community is structured
>>> into groups (contributors, committers, pmc), where personal commitment gets
>>> you higher in the ranks. This is not the case for the PMC, however. Just
>>> glancing over the wiki page, there are several people listed that haven't
>>> been active in recent months or sometimes even years. Just to name a few:
>>>
>>> * Ashish Vijaywargiya (most active till 2010)
>>> * Anil Patel (most active till 2010)
>>> * Vikas Mayur
>>> * Paul Foxworthy
>>> * David Welton (probably supported the project in the early stages)
>>> * Yoav Shapira (probably supported the project in the early stages)
>>> * Joseph Eckard
>>> * Bilgin Ibryam
>>>
>>> Andrew Zeneski has been the last addition to the committee in 2013, before
>>> him there hasn't been any change since 2007. The same argument could be made
>>> for a few people who are not really invested into the community any longer,
>>> push their own products, or have moved on to new projects.
>>>
>>> This is quite uncommon for a project that is based on personal commitment
>>> and begs the question why a committee remains static whereas clearly the
>>> project moves forward.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> View this message in context: http://ofbiz.135035.n4.nabble.com/The-future-of-OFBiz-Open-Discussion-tp4648865p4649277.html
>>> Sent from the OFBiz - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>>
>>
>

Jacques Le Roux

Re: The future of OFBiz - Open Discussion

Administrator

In reply to this post by Jacopo Cappellato-4

Le 16/03/2014 08:55, Jacopo Cappellato a écrit :
> * OFBIZ-5312/OFBIZ-4535 (2013/11): initial requirements and comments/reviews; up to now only the experimental SEO branch was affected (the task
> history is a huge mess)

I just wanted to note that I have made an abstract at https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ-5312?focusedCommentId=13820590
And with this last point https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ-5312?focusedCommentId=13936341 this branch is ready to be committed.
Even if I believe it's OK, before committing I'd appreciate if more people could test, thanks!

Jacques

Paul Piper

Re: The future of OFBiz - Open Discussion

I reread the flow of this email exchange and I feel obliged to point out a few things:

@Scott:
1) "I won't be attending simply because it is organized by Pierre [...]"

> I think that is a mistake. If any member of the community feels strongly enough to rattle the cages, the pmc should hear him out or alternatively ask him to publish the results on the ml so that the community can share the outcome. I can see how this is an understandable reaction, but I still think it may not be advisable to go harshly against those who are apparently interested in the project.

2) "When I joined this project there was very little infighting and contributing was a rewarding experience that earned you respect and praise from your peers."

> I am interested to hear how, from your experience, this changed. You can rest assured that I have deep respect for your contributions (or for anybody who is participating in this community for this matter). Perhaps you are sharing my belief that commitment is not rewarding at this moment?

3) "For those of you who have an opinion but aren't actually doing anything tangible (commit reviews, patch reviews, ticket research, contributing designs and documentation)"

> I think you are pointing directly towards the types of contribution the PMC values. As pointed out before, I think this is only half the truth. By reducing the involvement on code alone, I fear that you are taking away the team spirit. Any team effort on larger project requires good architects, good project managers, good requirement managers and quality managers right next to developers. By focusing only on code, you are pretty much taking the value out of the other contributions.

@ Jacopo
1) "I would like to mention that Pierre is the only one person in the history of the project that sent his remarks against the OFBiz PMC to the Board of the Apache Software Foundation, asking them to step-in and act versus the OFBiz PMC: he actually did it twice (2 years ago and again yesterday)."

> I can see that this is difficult not to take personally, but isn't that why the board of the ASF exists? If he feels misunderstood or neglected by the PMC, perhaps we should ask why and try to reason with him accordingly?!

2)"I completely disagree that the problem is that the PMC/committers group is not noticing contributors; the problem is instead that the current admission bar that we have set, is probably too high for this community."

> With a single sentence you pretty much vented your own frustration while simultaneously taking away other contributions. As Jacques also pointed out there is a long list of contributors who haven't received any merit despite their years of effort: Ruth, BJ, Rupert, etc. are all examples of this behavior and it is this that I think is breaking the community spirit. Some of them have left the community for these reasons by now, btw.

3) "As regards your specific position, since this seems to be your main concern/complain, please see below: " ... "Here is the whole list of commits in which you have some credit (over a few years):"

> Here again you focus on a single piece of contribution: code. That is probably only your own view on things, but I must say that I find it rather astounding. I would also like to point out that in no way I inferred that "this seems to be my main concern/complain". I can only speak for myself when I complain about problems in the community and so I did. Not only did you fail to see the point I was raising, you also turned it into a personal insult. I think this explains a lot on what is currently going on in the community.

4) “This is a completely different topic that doesn't affect in any way our decisions about new committers.”
> Actually it couldn’t be further from the truth. I currently have the impression that the PMC is run like a boys club, where those connected to the HWM are getting more likely to become a part of. I would like to point out that the list of people I mentioned who haven’t been active in this community in years, or perhaps only slightly for a short while, is also a list dominated by former or current HWM employees.
Again, I am not trying to offend those who have actually gained their merit through actual commitment, but with the list of people I mentioned there is at least some doubt. I also have nothing against HWM and I understand OFBiz’ history, but precisely because of it the PMC has to make sure it isn’t seen as overrun by a single company.

@David
1) "This is an inspiring reminder of how things actually work in the ASF. Apache OFBiz is not managed top-down, it is managed bottom-up based on actual effort and merit. "

If this were the case, then the discussion would go differently. It is definately a top-down management approach. I have no problem with it, but we should accept that this is the way it is: you gain merit through action and hence climb up the ladder.

Paul Piper

Re: The future of OFBiz - Open Discussion

I would also like to keep this in the logs for further reference:

https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ-5312

"Anil K Patel added a comment - 11 minutes ago
My suggestion does not fix any problem because, This Jira issue like many others is trying to fix a problem that does not exist.
Before contributors can expect help from experts in community they need to demonstrate that they deserve it.
In this case please go learn about content and website entity model and CMS implementation. You will find that all SEO requirements were addressed in OFBIz way before SEO term was coined.
Webpathalias entity tracks all the valid URL and it's content associations."