Hisham Mardam Bey wrote: > On Sun, Aug 3, 2008 at 1:46 PM, dan sinclair <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> On 3-Aug-08, at 1:27 PM, Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri wrote: >> >>> Hey, but that's ok for _YOU_, isn't it?! You already said it's fine >>> and that's exactly the purpose to use BSD over LGPL. We're just being >>> more friendly and instead of keeping it proprietary. >>> >> People contributing to the community? Sure that's ok for me. That's ok >> for everyone I believe. I think that's kinda the point. People >> contributing to the community works perfectly well under BSD and has >> been working perfectly well. >> >> > > Dan, if you're referring to the EFL community, then I really think you > should look at just how many active contributors we have. The number > of people contributing to CVS is tiny, I wouldn't exactly use the word > "perfect" to describe this situation, unless of course you think that > 5 or less people contributing code and a couple hundred users that > like to experiment with "alternate desktop environments" constitute > what you'd call a "community working perfectly well". In 10 years > time, we've made almost no noticible progress when it comes to growing > the EFL developer or user base. We're still regarded as a niche and > elitist group both in developer and user land. I believe its time to > change the rules of the game and see what happens, specially given the > fact that developers backed by companies are showing interest in > contributing code under LGPL (and are starting to pave the future path > of the EFL by doing so). >
And we are to assume it was the license all along? I can't say I agree with that. In fact I think it has nothing to do with the license, but possibly with the people involved. Raster is a developer, not a marketing machine and as far as I've been part of this community, I haven't seen anyone step forward to really act as the lead of a marketing type department for E. Also, has usage of open source in the corporate world been the same over the last 10 years? Did the introduction of the LGPL all the sudden accelerate open source into corporate use? I don't think it has as much to do with the license as it does with the people who are in the community. If we've pushed away people who could help in this dept then that was our fault. I think the biggest fear the community has is that letting in excessive amounts of devs will hurt the high performance and stability measures that we keep around here (I could be wrong, but it feels this way). This doesn't have to be the case and we could definitely open ourselves up a bit more, but I think we have to be careful how we do so and I think we have to refrain from jumping to conclusions on how to fix it, i.e. licensing changes. You said it yourself, we are considered niche and elitist and I can certainly think of reasons why that is. People find our use of CVS out-dated. They don't understand how CVS works because they've come from projects that use Subversion or Git instead and are used to those. I don't think these days it's really a matter of CVS just working, it may just be one of the blockers that many potential devs don't feel like bothering with. Another is just people in the community in general, we may not have this elitist tag for nothing ;) I think the true failure we generally have is we will wait a long time until raster has the opportunity to speak up about an issue. Can we not put together a "board" of people to help make these type of decisions? Have a loose vote for implementing something and go on our merry way. I know we've talked about having meetings before and that's never really happened, just too many people getting busy. Would be nice to have some people with a clear vision for where we want this project to go and then we aren't relying on a single person, who happens to end up busy quite often, to make the final call. In general, is it not best to just get code done and if it fails to perform to our standards, it gets replaced/removed/modified? At least something got done and if at least 50% of this code is useful are we not ahead of where we would have been had no one taken the initiative? Now this could go south and we could get a bunch of crappy code, but I don't think that will happen with the community we have. If we instill the vision on every developer who comes along instead of dumping their ideas in the trash we may just build a bigger community that can help us achieve what we've longed to achieve. I'm still new around here compared to other devs, but I think I'm somewhere between the old and the new group which gives me an interesting perspective :) Putting on my flame suit now, do your worst. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ enlightenment-devel mailing list enlightenment-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/enlightenment-devel
