Guys.
Here's a question: what do you think JSPWiki future should be? I'm
not talking about features, but the fact that we have about two
people maintaining the stable branch and developing new features, and
two people who regularly contribute code, and random patches from
here and there.
This is not a lot. Many of our plugins are getting outdated and
should be updated. There are lots of long-standing bugs that should
really be squashed (like why we still get sometimes "null" authors?),
and there are many stability issues in the current code base, which
are really hard to track down. The jspwiki.org main web site is very
disorganized, and our documentation is, well, below the normal open-
source level.
We have lots of nice plans, and people keep asking new features, and
we would like to provide them, but at least from my side there is
simply not just enough time to do all this. I have a regular life
and a day job (which does not involve any coding, so I can still
consider this a hobby). But as you all understand, there is more to
life than bug-hunting. And, of course, just having a couple of
active developers is a huge risk for the platform - if one goes away
due to real-life issues, the rest have to carry a really big load.
So, we really do need new people who want to step up and take a more
active role in the development, maintenance, documentation,
wikigardening, usability design, graphic design, organizing
volunteers, validating and managing bugs and ideas, hanging on the
IRC channel to help people, etc. I'm very grateful to the people
who're currently already working in these areas, but we're just not
enough. There are many fields which are just completely neglected.
If we continue on the current road, I fear that JSPWiki will dwindle
into a "hobbyist" platform, and die in a couple of years.
I know there are companies out there who are using JSPWiki as a basis
of their commercial offering. It would be appreciated if you could
start contributing more actively. It's a considerable amount of code
you're using, and because of the LGPL, you have to distribute the
modifications to your customers anyway, and some of you have even
made the changes available, but I just simply don't have the time to
sort out the changes you've done. If you don't actively start
submitting patches and fixes, they're simply not going to end up in
the code base. And the more you diverge from the official code base,
the more work you will have to do at every single release.
Maybe it's my imagination, but I happen to believe that JSPWiki is a
valuable resource, and I've spent a huge chunk of my free time to
develop it. I would hate to see it go to waste.
What say you? Who is willing to start really working on this? What
do you need? What do we need?
(Of course, you can just be quiet now. I can also draw conclusions
from that. I'm smart that way.)
/Janne
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