Hi all,
For your information, please find below the email sent to the ASF board at
1.01 AM this morning.
Regards,
Pierre Smits
*ORRTIZ.COM <http://www.orrtiz.com>*
Services & Solutions for Cloud-
Based Manufacturing, Professional
Services and Retail & Trade
http://www.orrtiz.com
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Pierre Smits <pierre.sm...@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 1:01 AM
Subject: Functioning and Future of Apache OFBiz
To: bo...@apache.org, human-respo...@apache.org
Dear Apache Board,
Jacopo, the chair of the PMC of our Apache OFBiz may have submitted or will
soon submit the quarterly report 'ASF Board Report 2014-03' to you for
review and evaluation of the health of our project in your next board
meeting.
In this report he, besides the others, point out 2 important aspects:
1. We have no issues that require Board assistance at this time, and
2. We have an ongoing discussion, within the PMC/committers group and
the community, about the current status of the OFBiz project;
oversimplifying the two positions are the following:
1. the ones that are worried that the project's progress is slower
than
in the past (several historical committers are indeed less
active) and push
to get more committers and PMC members onboard
2. the ones that believe that slowing down is natural in a project
that is reaching a stability phase and, considering the great
complexity of
the OFBiz codebase, it is important to only invite contributors that
clearly demonstrate a deep knowledge of the framework in order to
maintain and improve its quality and stability over time
With the second main bullet it seems that Jacopo tries, together with the
statement of his personal belief, to make it sound that the discussion is
- just a discussion as it might take place in any project,
- that it just started recently (as you might believe since there is no
previous report mentioning such a discussion), and
- that it all has to do with the output of the project.
Unfortunately, the discussion is going for a longer period than only the
months within the last quarter and the controversy between PMC/committers
and the rest of the community grows deeper.
In order to fully comprehend what the controversy is about I need to
elaborate on a) the OFBiz solution (the technical aspect), and b) the OFBiz
community (history and current setup) of the project.
a) the OFBiz solution
The output of the OFBiz project is not only a technical suite of core
functions and apis (the Framework, as the PMC/committers call it) to build
and host applications on and to process and persist its data, but it is
also a comprehensive and integrated suite of business
applications/solutions for various kinds of enterprises in diversity of
industry markets and sectors.
And it doesn't matter whether it is for a single organisation setup, a
multiple organisation setup or through a multi-tenancy setup. The total
package includes business applications for asset management, order
management, crm, invoicing, e-commerce, manufacturing, project management,
warehousing, in and outbound logistics, supply chain management
(purchasing), payment processing, financial and general account, reporting
and BI, to name but a few. Even functionality to kickstart new business
applications is integrated.
In essence, the Apache OFBiz solution is the SAP of Open Source - done the
Apache way.
This comprehensive suite has its business solutions, functions and apis
layered in 3 categories or levels:
1. The core (the FrameWork, as the PMC/committers call it) consisting of
the general/generic definitions, functions and apis for persisting and
processing of all kinds of data;
2. The base (applications), consisting of business solutions as/for
accounting (financial transactions, payment processing), content mgt,
human
resource mgt, manufacturing, catalog & product management, order mgt and
invoice processing, marketing, warehousing and logistics and work
effort mgt
3. Special purpose applications, e.g. for e-commerce, project mgt, asset
mgt, e-bay integration, google-integration and bi/reporting
This all-encompassing approach established itself while incubating within
the ASF and has been (and still is) the major aspect of the mission
statement of the OFBiz project. It is this all-encompassing
approach/charter that kickstarted the project before it came to Apache,
during its infancy as a podling and from day one as a TLP and has attracted
many users and contributors (with all kinds of technical backgrounds,
delivering contributions encompassing languages as Java, Groovy, XML, FTL
and javascript) from all kinds of cultures and business domains. And not
only programmers, but also documenters (books have been published), ui/ux
specialists and more.
In short, the OFBiz solution delivers more than you would expect at first
glance.
b) the OFBIZ community (history and current state)
The initiative started way back in 2001 (a few visionary developers had the
drive to start this and had the ambition to bring it under the ASF
umbrella). The initiative when through the incubation process and was
awarded TLP status in 2004. In this period the majority of work needed and
contributed was
in the fist layer (the core). This first period of incubation and TLP years
also set the policies and ruling that still is are being enforced today.
But the contributions by the initial community members and newcomers to the
applications in the other layers also continued and increased.
The PMC currently lists 13 names (of which the 2 mentors have never been
active in the community as far as I can tell). See
here<
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBADMIN/Apache+OFBiz+PMC+%28Project+Management+Committee%29+Members+and+Committers
.
As you can see, Erwan de Ferrieres - who is mentioned in the report above
as being the latest addition to the PMC - doesn't appear in the list of PMC
members. So basically the PMC hasn't changed since 2007. And the original
founders of the project (Andrew Jenezki and David Jones) aren't actively
participating in the project anymore.
Now the growing controversies.
1. Since the inception of the project only community members who
contributed regularly to the core of OFBiz have made the cut merit-wise
to
be invited to become committers. None of the other community members who
contributed to the other aspects of the project (the applications in the
other two layers, documentation or engaging in the mailing list to help
users) have ever made the cut. This has led to alienation to some of
those
contributors.
2. Since the departure of founder David Jones in 2010 as an active
member of the community - he felt that over time the contributions (bug
fixes and enhancements) to the core and the base applications had grown
to
include flaws he wanted fixed, but he failed to achieve consensus within
the PMC though there was and is support from other community members to
enhance the core and base applications, functions and apis to be able to
replace and enhance current legacy solutions by the output of other
Apache
Projects, e.g. Chemistry/JackRabbit for content management, SHIRO for
authentication/authorisation/security and session management, Drools/ODE
for rules and orchestration management, . He, since then, created OFBiz
evolution 2.
3. Though community members keep contributing (we currently have 1000
unresolved issues, of which 163 with patches) the approach to improve
output is not to attract more committers to guide the community members
to
provide more patches and commit approved ones, but to phase-out
applications from layer 3 and sub components from layer 2 in order to
decrease the workload on the existing active PMC members/committers (the
slim down roadmap).
4. A second PMC Member/committer has re-addressed the flaws in core and
base in the community and is willing to fix this together with the
community and within the project. Again there is support for this
innovation. And again no consensus can be reached with other PMC
members/committers - as it appears from postings in the MLs of the
project
5. Though the number of new users is growing (the attraction of OFBiz is
not its core, but that it is an open, integrated eco-suite of business
applications with an active community) the participation of PMC
members/committers in the communities ML is declining. Only 1 PMC
member/committer is active on a somewhat daily basis in the user ML and
as
a coach to help contributors to provide patches and helping in review
and
commit. Some PMC members only manage the same limited number of issues
year
on year and do not interact with the other community members.
6. Though committers can use their own discretion with regards to
resolving bugs, some of these committers see this also as a free pass to
dump code and functionality enhancements into the set of business
applications without delivering patches (that could be implemented in
older
versions) or involving other community members regarding establishing
the
need for it within the community, without establishing consensus
regarding
the added value, the requirements and solutions approach definition. Nor
trying to solicit assistance in requirements gathering & analysis,
testing
and communication of these solutions.
7. Though everybody in the community understands that nobody is obliged
to resolve issues but that everybody can assist in furthering issues to
resolvement, it is feared (by some) that raising an issue in JIRA means
that the reporter also resolves it (by delivering patches), or that
when a
PMC member/committer assigns an issue to himself it is also resolved by
him. Hence our 1000 open issues, of which over 800 are unassigned.
Since I joined the project in 2008, and have contributed - both in the MLs
and thru raising and resolving issues - regularly over the years, I see
the health of the OFBiz project trending downwards.
Hence my plea to you to help this project to stay healthy and innovative.
On Thursday 13th of March we are holding a teleconference on the health and
future of the OFBiz project. I invite you to join in to get a first hand
experience of the sentiments and viewpoints of the various community
members participating.
Details regarding the teleconference are:
LocationLocal timeTime zoneUTC offsetLos
Angeles<http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=137> (U.S.A.
- California)Thursday, 13 March 2014,
06:30:00PDT<
http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/na/pdt.html
UTC-7
hoursNew York <http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=179>
(U.S.A.
- New York)Thursday, 13 March 2014,
09:30:00EDT<
http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/na/edt.html
UTC-4
hoursLondon <http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=136>
(United
Kingdom - England)Thursday, 13 March 2014,
13:30:00GMT<
http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/eu/gmt.html>
UTCAmsterdam <http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=16>
(Netherlands)Thursday, 13 March 2014,
14:30:00CET<
http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/eu/cet.html
UTC+1
hourMoscow <http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=166>
(Russia)Thursday,
13 March 2014, 17:30:00MSK<
http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/eu/msk.html
UTC+4
hoursBangalore <http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=438>
(India
- Karnataka)Thursday, 13 March 2014,
19:00:00IST<
http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/asia/ist.html
UTC+5:30
hoursBangkok <http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=28>
(Thailand)Thursday, 13 March 2014,
20:30:00ICT<
http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/asia/ict.html
UTC+7
hoursAuckland <http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=22> (New
Zealand)Friday, 14 March 2014,
02:30:00NZDT<
http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/pacific/nzdt.html
UTC+13
hoursCorresponding UTC (GMT)Thursday, 13 March 2014, 13:30:00
Please find below some details about how to participate, but you can always
more info on the website ofhttp://freeconferencecall.com
*Conference Invite Details*
*Subject: * The Future of OFBiz - Open Discussion
*Date & time: * 2014-03-13 14:30 (GMT+01:00)
*Duration: * 2 hr.
*Notes: *
*Free Conference Call*
Conference Dial-in Number: +31 (0) 6 35205070 (Number in the Netherlands)
Participant Access Code: 779895#
<
http://www.freeconferencecall.com/fcci/internationalnumbers.aspx?lang=NL&altlang=EN&phonenumber=+31%20(0)%206%2035205070
When prompted enter the access code that has been assigned, followed by the
# key. Once connected to the conference, you will be able to talk and have
access to the touch tone commands listed below.
Participant Feature KeysExit - exit the callInstructions - conference
instructionsMute/Unmute - caller controlled muting
With best regards,
Pierre Smits
OFBiz community member
