Quoting Mathias Bauer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
Moreover, I for myself can't just add something even to the current developer release without going through some processes (like requirements analysis, specification etc.). I know and support that this shouldn't be necessary for "external" developers to the same extent, but OTOH it should be respected that we need to judge received patches carefully.
This is usually what Gnome is priased and course for. If anyone do it, he gets the credit --even if it breaks everything else. There are fewer barriers of entry. The question is how can we lower this barriers for new developers.
And BTW, OOo is not the only OS project that suffers from problems with external contributions. I'm a diligent reader of the Mozilla newsgroups or mailing lists (developers and users), and there are a lot of complaints about the slow acceptance of patches also. Moreover, the general willingness to work on fixes for bugs brought up by the community seems to be even lower than in case of OOo (though we all know that in our case it's also possible to improve it :-)).
Yes this is a constant with almost any development project. The Linux kernel have this issue also Apache and Mozilla to mention a few. We NEED to have this challenges just to prove we are a mature FLOSS project. Still one of the big difference is that they are awareness and vehiecles they have to capture train and incorporate new development. This infrastructure is rather poor for OOo.
This tells me that there is a general problem of complex OS projects that are mainly done by a core development team. The complexity of the software (this is different to the complexity/opacitiy of the code base!) makes if necessary that the development process must be managed in a way that usually has been developed over years.
As I read some time ago, a project like KOffice that is developed in a more open way (f.e. because it already started as an open project) also complains that they get too few developers - maybe this can show us that this is not a result of missing "opennness", but mainly a result of the complexity of the software that lets developes shrink back from it?
yes but at the same time, they also have gain a lot from new developments that connect to KOffice. Koffice right now is not just the KOffice project but a series of satelite projects that connect with KOffice.
"Free" developers very often prefer smaller projects, just because it's easier to enter them, it's easier to understand them, it's easier to add own contributions (and get the credits :-)). I think that's quite understandable and of course it's OK, but that should be seen when we are discussing contributions to OOo (or the lack of them).
Best regards, Mathias
-- Mathias Bauer - OpenOffice.org Application Framework Project Lead Please reply to the list only, [EMAIL PROTECTED] is a spam sink.
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