I have invested time and money in stabilizing the version I have. And I
developed a method to upgrade from the SVN. However I do not do this
David E. Jones sent the following on 2/3/06 12:46 PM:
>
> On Feb 3, 2006, at 1:56 AM, Andrew Dupa wrote:
>
>> Well I guess I'll just work it out by reading the code and looking at
>> the data model. My question was I thought pretty straight forward,
>> unfortunately people responded without thinking.
>>
>> I was hoping this community would be smart and intelligent enough to
>> support end users but they are it seems completely lost in a world of
>> never ending development which never brings out the real world
>> issues. No release management, no testing framework no stability.
>> Users who don't read questions but answer with the bleeding obvious.
>
>
> This, perhaps, comes from a misunderstanding of what OFBiz is. It is
> clear that it isn't what you expected it to be, and that is the case
> for many people who are used to purchasing a piece of software and
> becoming a "user" of the software.
>
> In a community-oriented open source project like OFBiz it only exists
> because the community drives it. There is no company involved. No
> investment from venture capitalists or angels and no bank loans or
> anything (well, except maybe American Express and various other credit
> card and home equity lenders during slower periods... ;) ).
>
> That means that the dozens of people who contribute to the project on a
> regular basis and the hundreds of people who use the software in their
> jobs generally can't get involved, I mean really simply cannot get
> involved, unless they find some work doing so. Andy and I invested
> quite a bit early on in the project, but this is certainly true of us.
> Neither of us (while I guess I'm not really sure about Andy) have a net
> worth in the black and without money coming in from consulting work,
> we'd be in trouble pretty quickly... Actually, it's not so bad, if it
> weren't for my ex-wife I'd probably be working 1 week a month for pay,
> another week per month on the project, and then spending the remaining
> time cruising the world on the BMW GS adventure bike I've been craving
> for years...
>
> Anyway, back to the point. OFBiz is a community driven project. We all
> get along as we can and help move the forward as we can, and to date
> ALL significant contributions to the project have been impelled mostly
> by making things easier and cheaper in the future for those involved.
> Lots of people have wanted to help, but it is just too much to do as an
> amateur (unless you have no need for an income... but even then without
> a project driving requirements and understanding, it is hard to get
> your head around).
>
> So, are there issues? Yeah. It sounds like you want to be involved with
> the project as a casual user, and that's almost impossible with OFBiz.
> If you aren't involved with the community and working regularly with
> the project then you pretty much have to hire someone who is involved
> with the community and has invested sufficiently to be able to work
> well with it.
>
> How is that different from major ERP packages? For them a "release" is
> the same as for us, and they have the same problem with testing as we
> do (ie the moving target problem). For them a "release" or a
> standardized version is mostly just a sales and marketing tool. Once
> these systems are customized (or "installed") out of the box testing
> (except for low level components... maybe that's why we have entity
> engine unit tests but not much else?) is not very useful, unless they
> maintain the tests in parallel with the customizations. They will also
> have various patches and changes that bring their system to a state of
> being a creation like that of the good Dr. Frankenstein: some of the
> "version" they think they have, some of the next version (but not all),
> and a bunch of changes that they alone are responsible for maintaining.
>
> Eventually OFBiz may be more usable for those who want out of the box
> use and no involvement whatsoever in the community, but it's not there
> yet, and I've written that dozens of times (look at my blog, the
> mailing lists, etc for all sorts of things along these lines). Releases
> in OFBiz have historically just been marketing efforts. For anyone
> doing customization it is a BAD BAD BAD idea to base it on a release.
> That will effectively cut them off from interaction with the community,
> and it will make it difficult to the point of "not worth it" to
> contribute to the project. If everyone just used releases, OFBiz would
> simply not exist.
>
> So, I'll say it again: if you aren't involved with the community or
> interested in becoming involved then hire someone that is or you'll be
> in pain for a long while. It's like "installation" SAP without any
> help... not many do that and if they do they hire people with
> experience to work on it. There are dozens of service provider
> companies all around the world, but don't expect most of them to
> advertise much in the OFBiz world. Most of the live sites and other
> deployments of OFBiz are sold by the service provider, only a few
> companies survive based on the references that come through the open
> source project....
>
> Hopefully that's good enough for now... This sort of question comes up
> a lot and I try to throw something like this out to the mailing lists
> or somewhere every other month or so to make it easier to find.
>
> -David
>
>
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