Paul P Komkoff Jr wrote:
Replying to Stipe Tolj:
now, first of all. This "policy", if I'm free to proclaim it in that way, is not invented by people maintaining Kannel. It's "invented" by various other open source projects where not only software engeneering aspects come in play, but also politics, in some sence and manner. (I have a lot of real-life examples for those politics paths and mature practices while actively in the Apache group and developing process). So I obviously know from which perspective I'm talking.
What I can say about this ... I will start from one real-life example. As you all know, I am working in russian cellphone company now. The company is big, and I am working in a just small branch of it, on a small position. Higher positions in a bigger branches, with bigger number of subscribers, not nesessary belongs to people more qualified than me. When I am advocating usage of kannel, they are cowardly refuse using my patched version I am jumping around with (and running here for more than a year now), and trying to use "official" version. (There's a reason why they think such way, I'll try to explain it later if needed). They taking latest "stable" tarball from site, ... installing it on something such flexible as solaris 8. What they see? They see poor http performance, NO https at all, hosed sites which work in more than one russian charset. And not to mention correct MSISDN extraction for cases when you need to run multiple wapboxes, and you need to run multiple wapboxes because they CRASH.
What do you think they do then? They approve purchase of Ericsson WGP, Logica CMG, for insane prices and with limited functionality (like forced 20 req/second cap).
Yes, conservative philosophy is not kannel.org invention. Much larger projects, like linux or apache, doing same things. But apache is a most installed web server on the net, linux is most installed in its niche. And please count active, working kannel as wap gateway installations - and compare it to count of deployed closed-source wap gateways.
Even akpm and linux accepting unpopular patches if there is demand from large markets - like (last as I remember) huge pages for designated gid, or mlockall and realtime sched for the same criteria - it's the ugly kludges but they are needed for large databases like oracle and digital audio processing stations.
If anyone wants kannel to gain any share, it needs to be improved. If goal is death and decay, then evolution is absolutely unnesessary.
I agree. In that extend that "ugly pachtes" are getting in if the "demanding market" is really that big.
Ok, some may say now: "you say a) and then b) again, which is contrairy". No! What I mean is that the group is not a group of puristic people (ok, let's don't count Alex into it, he is ;) [just a joke for the early morning Alex, forgive me]. We do take those demands into account, since we know (at least from my personal perspective) *why* we develop Kannel: for those that use it. It's like persons oblieged to collect items. We don't do it simply to "own" it, we do it to see it live, work and pupulate itself.
So, yes, I agree, getting things into Kannel is more then legitim and should always be the aim of the group. Mainly the conservative "think about it again" answer is a way to make people re-mirror on their own about the quality and design aspects of their patches.
So... what patches would this big devision running Solaris need? ;)
Stipe
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