I will tell you this, I hate overt marketing.
When I go to the Movies and they start playing commercials, not
previews, I'll close my eyes, put my fingers in my ears or walk out to
take a break.
My wife laughs at me since her background is Marketing Research and says
it doesn't bother her. So far she hasn't threatened
to not go out with me :)!
Seriously, I have occasionally wondered if there is a better balance
model for OSS projects. On one hand there is Spring where they actually
are able to pay their core developers based on proceeds from
training/certification. On the other hand we have
a mostly community/voluntary based development such as Struts/Apache. I
am not sure where that balance should lie or if it should change.
Nor do I feel I have the right to even suggest what it should be. Though
I think its a healthy question to ask every now and then.
How can Struts continue to grow and maintain an identity that active
committers and the active user community can live with.
Related to this topic, and one that would be interesting is to find out
what the turnover rate is between different OSS projects are.
Is there a correlation between that and the development/contribution
model they use ? Struts has been lucky in that some of the original
committers
such as Martin Cooper and Ted Husted still stay involved. Still there
has been a quite a number of committers over the years,
and I wonder how that compares to other projects that have also been
successful.
-Rob
James Mitchell wrote:
I'm inclined to vote down anything mixing Community and Corporate agenda. I
think that's just a bad mix. In fact, the ASF has specific rules/guidelines
with respect to corporate involvement (employment) with too many project
leads.
There's a reason that Apache projects are so successful, in one word ...
"community". I hate it as much as the next guy when movement seems to
stagnate for weeks/months, but that's never just cause to bring in
money/free stuff as incentive.
The folks who want to help when there's a prize at the end will be the first
ones to dump your a## when you really need them, but don't have an incentive
to offer.
If Struts (or any project) doesn't have enough volunteers to keep the work
going, then we have bigger issues.
Just my $0.02!
On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 10:47 AM, Robert Leland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Don I have a few questions
1) I agree that this contribution has to be valuable to the contributing
company
both technically and marketing. Back in 2003 when I obtained free IntelliJ
licenses from Jetbrains for the Struts
Committers all they wanted was acknowledgment on our web page and that was
voted down as too commercial.
To IntelliJ's credit they still provided the license and later expanded it
to all of Apache.
How has the Struts PMC changed since then to allow what your proposing ?
2) What if a proposal isn't on the short list of features, however when it
is proposed the Struts community
its viewed as a useful idea ?
3) What if it turns out that two competing companies have different
implementations, which is a great place to be in.
Do we need to think this far ahead or using Agile methods do we not
want to over design this process initially ?
-Rob
Don Brown wrote:
As more and more companies start using open source software, many,
like mine, are looking for ways to give back to the community. They
want a way to contribute and ensure their contribution will be noticed
and appreciated. What if we had a feature sponsorship program that
encouraged companies to donate engineering time to filling out needed
features in Struts?
I imagine it would work like this:
1. The Struts community comes up with a short list of desired
features with high-level specs
2. Companies (or individuals) could "sign up" for a feature and
donate internal engineering time to implementing the feature
3. The Struts community would review then commit the feature
4. The release notes for that version and perhaps somewhere on the
website would note who gets credit for the feature
This would help those that want to donate time what features are most
needed by the community and give them a way to receive recognition for
their work in a very public way. A key component in this proposal
is the way credit is given to the work, something that might encourage
the marketing departments of the respective companies. The list of
desired features is also important as it ensures their effort will not
be in vain, and it also implies the support of the Struts dev
community to work to apply the patch in a timely manner.
Thoughts?
Don
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