On Nov 15, 2008, at 4:27 PM, David E Jones wrote:
On Nov 15, 2008, at 3:09 PM, Shi Yusen wrote:
+1.
The reason is simple: nobody takes the role of project manager in
OFBiz.
When Redhat aquired JBoss, I found almost every project had a new
project manager who really helped the projects released more and more
predictable.
At the beginning as TLP, Jacopo Cappellato looked like preparing the
release version. And when he joined HotwaxMedia, he's missing I
guess.
Someone in the PMC should stand out. Jacques Le Roux or Scott Gray?
PMC, programmers meeting committee? If so, it's a quite pitty for
an ERP
platform. :)
Kind Regards,
Shi Yusen/Beijing Langhua Ltd.
OFBiz is not commercial software with paid developers. JBoss may be
available under an open source license, but it is developed under a
commercial model, not a community-driven model like OFBiz.
In the case of a community-driven software project, what would a
project manager do? Who would he/she boss around? Who would be
accountable for delivery and how would that accountability be
enforced?
I clicked on "Send" too quickly...
I hope I'm not getting into revisionist history, but my experience
with community-driven software so far is that if someone does propose
something and try to recruit others to work on it then it usually
fails. Generally the champion of the effort has to work on it
themselves, and keep working on it until others start _using_ it, and
then they will get involved with improving and extending it. It's just
that simple.
Personally I know I've left a wake of unfinished projects where I
tried to recruit others and identify a goal to work towards, like the
framework improvements and framework-only release (a starting point
for higher level releases, something easier). As soon as I got
involved in increased workload, moving, and organizing and preparing
for ApacheCon and such I stopped working on it... and so did everyone
else!
With new things I'm trying to push, like adoption of open standards
and building some requirements and designs that we can base future
enhancements and extensions of OFBiz on, my plan is to work on them
personally as much as I can and do so until others join in.
That's how things get done in community-driven projects: by
leadership. That's how everything in OFBiz has been done. Someone lead
the way, and others joined in... hundreds of times in the last 7.5
years on hundreds of parts of OFBiz. There is a big difference between
leaders and manager, and what self-organizing communities need is
leadership, not management. That's the meritocracy way.
-David
