Re: Users - ASF Whaaa reply

Posted by David E. Jones on Dec 14, 2005; 7:21am
URL: http://ofbiz.116.s1.nabble.com/Users-ASF-Whaaa-reply-tp136680p136681.html


On Dec 8, 2005, at 7:25 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

>  I am just coming at this from (in my mind) a practical point of  
> view. It
> was mentioned that by being under the Apache umbrella we would attract
> more experienced contributors or just more contributors as a result of
> the change, therefore giving some contributors that now participate a
> break. These contributors are free to do what they wish already, no  
> one
> is holding their feet to the fire, they most likely contribute out of
> pure passion for programming or a passion for the project or some  
> other
> personal reason, so how would the ASF realy change anything in that
> perspective? (reading between the lines here, please correct me if  
> I am
> mistaken).

In a way this is true, but for the most part it is secondary to the  
motivation that I think drives this project. OFBiz is sufficiently  
complex that it is almost impossible to participate and really work  
on the software in anything less than a full-time capacity. I think  
everyone in the core team of OFBiz right now is to some extent basing  
their personal income and maintenance on OFBiz-related efforts.

So, technically no there is no one holding my feet to the fire...  
except an ex-wife, half a dozen credit card companies and other  
banks, a landlord, and so on. ;)

Naturally to stick with something like this long enough to be  
effective it does require some passion for it, but I don't think any  
of us is lucky enough for that to be a sufficient motivation to allow  
us to be here.

>  My contention is, if the contributors associated with ASF projects  
> were
> interested in the further development of OFBiz then they would  
> already be
> "on the bandwagon" by now. This theory is alluded to in one of the
> replies to my post, as well as the fact that we see some dead ASF
> projects out there as well as vibrantly evolving projects like Tomcat.

This is a good point, though the interesting part is that this is  
already the case. In fact, it is just these people that are  
affiliated with ASF and interested in OFBiz (or doing projects based  
on it) that are helping push this forward. Will it attract more  
developers? Who knows... I think it will increase exposure and  
credibility and those who are interested but just didn't know it  
before may very well start doing OFBiz-based projects and then  
eventually move into a more serious contributing role.

> It already makes me want to bite my own leg off in regards to  
> people who
> have branched out and made GPL offshoots of OFBiz, although those who
> have engaged in those projects have committed quite a bit back to the
> community, why would you even branch out and change the creators  
> vision
> of a project and modify the way that it is be distributed instead of
> contributing all of your changes back to OFBIZ if you want to post  
> them
> to a project!.... Sorry Big thorn in my side :(

I totally agree that this sort of thing is not ideal, but it is also  
something that we want to allow. At least they are contributing back  
to the project and helping with certain things, and without their GPL-
based derivative work they may not be involved with the project at  
all. So, I still appreciate their contributions in spite of still  
believing that this is not only less useful to OFBiz, but will also  
eventually turn out to be more expensive and less profitable than  
joining with the community here.... Naturally only time will tell  
though. In the mean time, I'm grateful for whatever help we can get.

Thanks for your comments, I'm glad to see there is interest and  
thought about these things...

-David



 
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