> Why is this a problem. We develop Trac to provide people with the > tools, it really doesn't matter if they don't know what Trac is. Brand > identity issues matter much less in a FOSS world, where money isn't a > concern.
Absolutely it's a concern. I have many, many hours invested into using Trac as a solution. As the old adage says, "Time is money". Whether something takes a lot of time or it takes a lot of money, it's expensive. If Trac were to fail and stop being developed, I'd have to move to an alternate solution and that would entail many more hours of time spent. Let me use myself as a specific example. We originally started using a version control system called TLIB (around 1989). Later we switched to CVS because we needed more modern features. Most recently we moved to Subversion. We converted all of the revision history from one system to the next. Making those moves was expensive even though both CVS and Subversion were FOSS. I also used to use CVSTrac for many years and switched recently to Trac because it was more powerful and more actively developed. Again we converted all of our old CVSTrac data to Trac. That move was also "expensive". There are lots of examples of FOSS where they've made branding important. Take Apache and Mozilla for instance. I'd argue that their efforts towards branding have significantly improved their projects. The best project ever invented is of no consequence if nobody knows it exists. If nobody cares, nobody's going to work with it and it will eventually die. "Branding" may have some negative marketing connotations, but the concept of identity and awareness is very real. > Of course, the votes on t.e.o are just to guide us. It is being called > into question as to if we actually know what users want, so the vote > numbers give at least some idea. There is a huge non-response bias of > course, so the numbers must be taken with a grain (or 12) of salt. In addition to non-response bias from people who don't care enough to vote, there's also a bias because it's not particularly obvious how to enable voting. It wasn't until I searched the newsgroups again that I found out the trick to enabling the voting buttons (you have to go to the preferences page and create a cookie before you can vote). Another problem with the voting is that the tickets weren't originally created with the intent of clear purpose for voting in mind. If you look at the first four entries on the report right now, it's not really clear to me what the distinctions are between "Add support for Master tickets" and "Bug dependencies/relations" is. At first blush it seems like they might boil down to the same thing. But that doesn't mean you could combine their votes into a single weight because people might have voted for both. I'm similarly confused about "Multi-project support" and "better support for multiple repositories". I'm not saying they're the same thing, but it's not clear to me what common ground they may or may not have. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Trac Development" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/trac-dev?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
