Dear John and Dear all,
First of all: I want to say that i fully agree with John in the matter of
registration. Make this look like a feature by saying ".. if one registers
we can better keep everybody informed about the important changes " and so
on ... I also think that most of the users whould pay at least little money
for getting SME .. i do not know of any other project that can compare
itself with the SME Server and still is free of charge ..
Secound : i have, at least most of the time, some spare time per week and
while i am writing my first addon to SME right now i am getting back into
Perl again ... the Problem here, as i see it, is simply that there is no
useful instuctions on how to write code .. some basic instructions, not on
perl but in the structure of code for SME .. look at the SugarCRM Project ..
they have set up a guide years ago to enable the interested coders to join
and that did the job very well.
I took a look at the structure but without guidance it is more of a search
and this way it is more time consuming then the coding itself.
Best
Rudi
----- Original Message -----
From: "John Crisp" <jcr...@safeandsoundit.co.uk>
To: <discussion@lists.contribs.org>
Cc: <devi...@lists.contribs.org>
Sent: Wednesday, May 07, 2014 5:32 PM
Subject: [devinfo] v9 Development holdups
Dear all,
we have something of an issue with current development which we need to
try and resolve.
Quite simply, the only person really doing any coding work on v9
currently is Ian (i.e. pushing forward rather than bug fixing), aided
and abetted by a small dedicated group doing testing and verification.
RC1 is on the bubble, but at the minute without Ians work, pretty well
nothing would happen, and we really need to try and find a way to get
him more help as a matter or urgency.
Ian has mentioned the lack of core developers before, and we really need
to address this quite urgently.
A few of the options I can see.......
1. Encourage core developers from user base
How do we get more people involved in this ? We lost a lot of people
over the years as the distro stagnated. I am sure we will pick up more,
particularly if we get v9 out and raise interest in it, but this isn't
going to happen over night.
2. Pay for additional developers
The first problem is one of trust I guess. Second is the time it will
take to get them up to speed (I have no idea on this) and thirdly is the
cost (I have no idea on this either). We have some money, but not a
fortune. What needs doing, how much would it cost ?
Open to any suggestions on this.
3. Any other bright ideas ?
Ultimately, if users want to see their distro thrive and survive they
have got to roll their sleeves up and muck in a bit. Leaving it all to
'someone else' will not get the job done.
I am sure there are many capable developers out there. Even a handful
would make a big difference.
On top of core devs we need people for a myriad of other easier tasks.
Everyone is capable of doing something, and if you can't we can teach
you :-) Just drop me a line.....
Lastly, there is the problem of communicating all of this to users.
In simple terms there are 20-40,000 installs out there, but only around
a thousand people or so on the mailing lists - I believe
updates/announce has the most subscribers.
The forums often are only used by problem seekers so only used
infrequently by the majority, and as we cannot mail any of the
registered users there, it's not very effective when you need to
communicate this type of thing.
Currently you do not have to do anything to get a copy of Koozali SME
and I believe we should be looking at asking users to register in some
way when they either download or install so we can keep in communication
with them, and appeal more widely to them.
Even if it isn't mandatory, they should ALWAYS only get a copy via a
'voluntary' registration / ask for donation page.
If you look about, more and more projects are using similar systems.
I note that even Ubuntu now asks for a donation before downloading from
main site so I don't think we should be scared of doing this sort of
thing.
Whatever we do, we have to do SOMETHING to try and change things.
Ian needs and deserves some help.
B. Rgds
John Crisp
President
Koozali Foundation
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