"[EMAIL PROTECTED]" wrote : Try doing some work on it then. A mail service support IMAP is not a priority task. Scott, first off Andrew asked for the "whining" requests from "pain in the ass users." Your seemingly snippy reply to a legitimate request from a real or potential customer seems counter-productive to your goals of attracting both customers and (perhaps more importantly at this stage of the project) developers.
It seems to me that there is a significant chicken-and-egg problem here. I have to imagine that there is real demand out there for an open-source alternative to Exchange. A real alternative, including IMAP support (how can this not be a priority??), but also calendaring, Outlook (i.e., MAPI) support, mobile device support, etc. If a true F/OSS alternative to exchange existed, especially one that had a strong support infrastructure and a viable company behind it (like JBoss, of course), then I can't imagine that a significant corporate user base would not develop--one that would be more than willing to pay for support and training. The M1 release, while a great start, cannot possibly go into any semblance of production in a real organization. Thus, there won't be any real customers to create the feedback and demands that seems to be required to stimulate support for continued development of the project from within JBoss. Thus, the project may well be dead, which would be a tr! ue shame. I had the pleasure of speaking pretty extensively with Marc yesterday. One of the things I walked away with from this conversation was that for the Professional Open Source model to work, especially if you are targeting enterprise customers with infrastructure services, you have to have relatively mature products before you can expect any real return on investment (to be "zero cash-flow" or "cash-flow positive" or whatever term he used). Mail Services is simply not there yet. This is a classic R&D investment conundrum. Are you willing to invest the time and capital necessary to get the product to a point that it can get past the "try it out" phase to the "roll it out" phase? It seems the big problem here is lack of developer support, especially from the outside community. James seems to have much the same problem. Perhaps the project isn't sexy enough or developers don't see personal (or intrinsic) value in contributing to this particular project. It would seem necessary to do one or both of the following: a) invest in the necessary "professional developer" time to get this thing ready for prime-time, or b) put forth a significant marketing effort to attract/incent outside (amateur) developers to participate. Lacking either of these, it seems unlikely that this project can succeed. Andrew indicates that (a) is not happening at present. Assuming this is the case and things won't change internally at JBoss (I would argue perhaps that they should, but won't here), it seems like some effort towards (b) would be a relatively easy and cost-effective solution. I might suggest a couple of things. First, you might consider posting a request for developers on the home page--a "hot project" box or something to entice potential contributors towards this project. Figure out some way to make this project seem sexy and worth a hackers investment. Second, I would suggest taking the time to put together some form of architectural overview at a low enough level that it is fairly simple for a good developer to get started quickly (reducing barriers to entry in economic terms). For my part, I downloaded the source and have been trying to figure out how things are glued together. I've had little luck, thus far. I have no doubt that given enough time, I could figure out how it all works, but that would require a major investment of my time. For a relatively minor investment of Andrew's time, I (and other potential contributors) could get quickly up to speed and contribute meaningfully to the effort. Hope this helps, or at least sparks some more debate on the subject. Paul York, Ph.D. Student Management Information Systems University of Georgia View the original post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3854077#3854077 Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&p=3854077 ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: Sybase ASE Linux Express Edition - download now for FREE LinuxWorld Reader's Choice Award Winner for best database on Linux. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=5588&alloc_id=12065&op=click _______________________________________________ JBoss-Development mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/jboss-development
