David E Jones wrote:
This is a great tool. The problem with the tool and the approach in
general to this sort of release management is that it assumes top-down
management of a project.
In the Release Plan document it starts out by explaining the nature of
OFBiz and the community that drives it. Most ASF projects, and many
other open source projects, are community driven but are also more
limited in scope and have either an existing specification to work
toward, or have a sufficiently limited scope that the definition of
targets for a release is not overly burdensome.
With OFBiz it's not just the size of the scope, but the fact that the
scope depends on what different contributors to OFBiz need over time,
for themselves or their clients/customers. If we had a budget for
driving OFBiz top-down that could result in the same volume of
progress it would have to be around $5-10M per year (my own estimate
of course, no Gartner or the like has deigned to look into this).
In short there is a reason why OFBiz is the only real community driven
open source enterprise automation project out there. The closest
alternative is probably Adempiere, but that is more of a community
driven effort to replace a bad vendor that has mostly stepped out of
the picture.
So, until someone comes along with a sufficient budget to drive things
in a more "traditional" way, we have to stick with what works
according to what people are willing and able to contribute.
I think if we really believe in the community oriented model that we
shouldn't view ourselves as "just waiting for a budget to go back to a
top-down model". We know that the top-down model always leads to lock in
and all the other negatives of a single monolithic vendor. The Linux
kernel has already shown that you can get distributed scale with
multiple large vendor players giving the power assist. I think that's
the future we want to be living in.
--
Ean Schuessler, CTO
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
214-720-0700 x 315
Brainfood, Inc.
http://www.brainfood.com