On Mar 2, 2012, at 7:50 AM, Hans Bakker wrote: > Jacopo, > > You would even consider forking?
From Wikipedia [*]: "[...] More recently, distributed revision control (DVCS) tools have popularised a less emotive use of the term "fork", blurring the distinction with "branch". With a DVCS such as Mercurial or Git, the normal way to contribute to a project is to first branch the repository, and later seek to have your changes integrated with the main repository. Sites such as Github, Bitbucket and Launchpad provide free DVCS hosting expressly supporting independent branches, such that the technical, social and financial barriers to forking a source code repository are massively reduced." In order of preference (descending), here are the options I see for the future of the OFBiz framework: 1) develop a great Apache OFBiz framework 2.0 within the OFBiz community; then release it separately from the Apache OFBiz ERP 2) greatly clean up and improve the existing framework (I was not sure if this could go at #1) 3) if the above will not be possible (frankly speaking, in the committers group, apart from David, none of us ever implemented with success an open source framework) we should also consider to drop the existing code and have our community focusing on the ERP part (as Hans seems to advocate); at this point Moqui would be the most natural choice; if we will ever go with this path a great exchange of information will have to happen between the two projects: for example OFBiz will probably have to ask the Moqui framework to evolve some of its features; given the current nature of the Moqui project, I doubt that the OFBiz committers will be ever invited as committers there; if Moqui will be our choice, I see two possibilities: 3.a) we base the Apache OFBiz ERP on a release of Moqui: this will only be possible if Moqui release will have all the features we need (and if Moqui community will be interested in getting contribution to evolve in the direction required by OFBzi) 3.b) if 3.a will not be possible because OFBiz will need some features that Moqui community will not consider as a good fit for Moqui, then, under the guidance and bless of David, we could work on a fork: get the code from a Moqui release, import in our repository and add to it, in a controlled way, the features we need; of course this should be always kept as close as possible to the original code; we could synch our custom code with every new Moqui release; I was not thinking about *stealing* code to Moqui and the fact that David is both the founder of OFBiz and of Moqui and he is both in the OFBiz PMC and the leader of the Moqui project will definitely facilitate this; but it will be still an ugly solution but for example when you said: "My proposal is that Apache OFBiz will be in the future just the ERP system based on many opensource products like birt and also Moqui...." you are actually implying that the ERP applications will be able to use Birt... but this requires some sort of framework and what would you do if Moqui will not think that Birt is a good fit for them? 4) if Moqui will not be a good option we may consider other frameworks (?), but it will be difficult, or continue with what we have Jacopo [*]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(software_development)
