I should have added earlier that the openEHR Java project is a pretty good example of the meritocracy Tim wants to see. It has 16 committers, and the list remains as active as ever, with a large number of subscribers. Although currently under-resourced, it works in exactly the way it should, not only that, its history is typical. The original core of code was written by Rong Chen and his small company, as part of a system to deploy at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. Like everything else, the core initial code needed to be built by a very small number of people, with a very clear and complete idea of openEHR, and what they wanted to build. Large additions have been done by the people at Zilics, Seref at UCL, and various others. Many other programmers are using the code and constantly improving it. None of them do so unless it aids them in solving a problem they are working on.
There is nothing stopping more people joining either. The limitation that I would say this project has is not lack of volunteers or enthusiasm, it is dedicated paid time to: * do proper architecting of large changes / enhancements * do better project management (admittedly, this could be improved today for free by making better use of the openEHR Jira issue tracking system) * get together physically and meet. It is hard to achieve some of this stuff with no financial sponsors. - thomas -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.openehr.org/mailman/private/openehr-technical_lists.openehr.org/attachments/20101118/4a769cd7/attachment.html>