Hi All, In the thread suggestion have been made to move applications (as a fork/split off) away from the Apache OFBiz project to be maintained by other people. This is part of an ongoing discussion that started back in 2012 (if I recall correctly). Back then this didn't lead to consensus. Now it also seems that this is a subject that community members aren't willing to consent to.
Diminishing the project to something that Scott would like to result in (a project that only works on - in a debatable order of importance - frame work elements, base registers as party, order and product, and e-commerce) is, in my opinion, a path to the ASF attic. Yes, it means that the current group of committers and PMC members can reduce their workload by focussing on the issues they care about (which they already do - nothing changes in that aspect). But the additional benefit for them (and negative impact on you as user and contributor to parts that aren't in their sphere of interest) is that they don't have to consider the issues you raise and you as a (potential) committer. Like I said it is a path to the attic. And let me explain why. Contraction to the favourites applications of the few leads to less. Less adoption of OFBiz as a suite of business solutions. Leading to less contributors, leading to less committers, leading to less issues reported, leading to less issues resolved. And this leads to even more contraction. It is a vicious circle. Because sooner or later people move on. And the above is what this project doesn't need. What you shouldn't go for. An Apache project is nothing more and nothing less than a group of people willing to contribute and collaborate. And the result of that contribution and that collaboration is something that the (majority of the) users - also you - need and/or want. But it all starts with that willingness. When you look through our OFBiz JIRA and the mailing lists you'll find that there have been and are plenty of people - again also you - contributing to all kinds of aspects of the project. It doesn't (and shouldn't) matter whether that contribution is improvements (bugs and otherwise) to the feature set of the software, in the area of documentation, or even regarding process and policy improvements. You are, with your contributions of any kind, contributing to the health and future of the project. And never forget: your contributions matter, even if some regards them as minor or mediocre. So the first part of participating in this project is covered and secured. Lots of people willing to contribute! As for the second part, the willingness to collaborate, it cannot be denied that people have favourites. Some prefer to work on issues related to framework, some prefer to commit patches of issues from people they like collaborating with. This is also thru for this project. And though it leaves some areas of the project (temporarily) under addressed it can be easily remediated. By inviting more contributors to be a committer. That will lead to more issues resolved, more people working with others, a project where losing a PMC member or a contributor is covered with replacement, an increase in adoption. And this is a virtuous circle. This is the circle we should go for. Now, we don't have to discuss setting up additional technical infrastructures as svn sub-projects with associated JIRA constructs and mailing lists when we don't want to embark on that journey of attracting and getting more. Without more people willing to collaborate it is a moot point. As I said earlier in this posting we have (and had) a lot of people contributing to all of the aspects of the project. All of these are potential committers. Yet it seems that inviting a person to be a committer is something that may only happen when the contributions of that person are of an exceptional benefit to the project, when contributor has super human characteristics, or when the contributor works in the areas that are favoured by the deciders of this project. We need to address that mindset within our community first. Before we discuss setting up additional lower, technical infrastructures to ensure that the other (good) applications get into releases. In fact, we wouldn't be having this discussion about workload and such with more people on board. So far we have read the viewpoints of Jacopo, Jacques and Scott (as PMC Members). I invite others to share their viewpoints as well. The future of OFBiz (and your role and contributions) is important enough to express your viewpoint. Regards, Pierre Smits *ORRTIZ.COM <http://www.orrtiz.com>* Services & Solutions for Cloud- Based Manufacturing, Professional Services and Retail & Trade http://www.orrtiz.com
