David, I totally agree with your vision, the purpose of my original proposal to use the JIRA roadmap feature was just to have a clear understanding of your points 1), 2) and 3) So that, day by day, everyone can clearly see what the community has decided to "clean up before we do a release", "just develop and include" and "critical bugs or security holes we should fix".
Creating a JIRA version (even for the framework only), selecting issues and scheduling them for that version is just how jira helps us to do your point 1), 2) and 3). -Bruno 2008/4/30 David E Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > On Apr 29, 2008, at 2:54 PM, Ean Schuessler wrote: > > > 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. > > > > I can't speak for everyone here, but my opinion of the driving force > behind OFBiz is definitely the community. My comments were not meant to > imply that certain things can't happen without corporate or other > sponsorship from a big enough single entity, but that such is not the nature > of the OFBiz community or any community driven projects, so we have to rely > on what people are willing to contribute, a la the community driven open > source model. > > That said, one of the big objectives as I see it now for OFBiz is to > develop the community, a sort of business development for open source > projects. Our focus in the past for community develop has been mostly around > fostering and encouraging contributors. Now that we have a strong framework > and generic business artifacts base in order for adoption of OFBiz to grow > we need stronger service providers and a wider community of users, whether > or not they also participate as contributors. > > My reasoning behind that is that most enterprise (and other) products are > created and driven by a central company and to a large extent it is the > reputation and name of that company that drives people to accept and desire > the software offered. > > While OFBiz itself can be a brand that we as a community promote, OFBiz > itself has no funds for marketing or evangelism, leaving the burden of those > efforts to the community, to whoever wants to contribute such things. In > order for large companies to use OFBiz on a wider basis they need a > reputation and name to sell to stakeholders in their organization. > Eventually I hope that OFBiz will have such a name on its own, but for now > that's sadly not the case. > > In short if we can work together to attract larger services organizations > to the OFBiz community and to grow services organizations working based on > OFBiz it will open things up for the next stage of growth and progress for > the project. > > Right now there are large services organizations using OFBiz, but not > advertising such or proposing it to their clients so much, partly because of > limited internal skilled people available (from what I can tell...). Most of > their projects are because their clients are requesting OFBiz, but the > services organizations are not recommending it. Some examples I'm aware of > include Euro/Amer companies like Accenture and Indian companies like TCS, > Satyam, etc. > > I'm not sure if these companies are used to recommending solutions and > doing marketing, but they are the largest organizations involved with OFBiz > (aside from end-users) and because OFBiz doesn't have it's own marketing > budget and coordinated efforts, the service providers are the only ones with > a sufficient commercial interest to invest in this. > > Now, if we could get press attention even though we don't have money to > push it we might make some great progress. However, and this might be based > on my jaded view of the world, but most press organizations talk about what > is making money, even in the open source world. Apache gets in the news > sometimes because of games played with Sun and others, and because of large > user bases for lower level tools in many cases. > > Anyway, this is a big effort going forward that I've been thinking about > lately, ie the business development around OFBiz... not so much of OFBiz > itself as that only applies so much, but around OFBiz. > > That said one of our big tools for that is to do GA binary releases and > make a big stink about them. That's probably the strongest tool any open > source project has. > > To start that off I'd like to focus on the framework and do a release > branch and a GA binary release of it. After that we'd move on to the base > applications along with the framework. For the framework itself the things > that we need help with and to consider are: > > 1. is there anything in the framework that we should or want to clean up > before we do a release and "set things in stone" more than they are now? > > 2. are there new features that we've been talking about for while that we > should just develop and include? (the entity field automatic auditing > feature is one I decided to spend a couple of hours adding yesterday; LDAP > auth OOTB would be another nice one to add, and I'm sure there are more) > > 3. are there critical bugs or security holes we should fix? (one thing > that comes to mind is tools and default behavior where applicable to protect > against XSS/cross-site-scripting) > > 4. who can help with this? who can help test and write unit tests for the > framework? who can help implement new features and fix bugs and such? > > What we really need here from contributors is pro-active effort. If you'd > like to help but you're not sure what to work on you can ask, but please be > sensitive about requesting assistance or mentoring from core developers or > other contributors as that may keep them from doing things that can be > directly contributed. In other words, we need people who can help get this > done and while we're at it if there are others who want to get involved > please do in a pro-active, self-motivated way. > > BTW, sorry for hijacking your comment Ean... I've been thinking about this > a lot lately and responding to your comment seemed to flow into this. > > -David > > >
