On Aug 15, 2006, at 9:17 AM, Andrus Adamchik wrote:
To expand on this point... Building an association with a goal of promoting a proprietary code base (with the owner not being a part of it) is an exercise in futility. If your are a business owner whose business depends on WebObjects technology, investing in such foundation is a waste of money, as you still have no say on the future direction of the product.
I don't completely agree here. Obviously we have no say in the direction of the product; Apple is going to serve their internal needs first and there probably won't be any cycles left over for anything else. But I do think there is value to us in promoting WO however we can. For our own personal business reasons, the more buzz there is about WO the more likely clients are to be enthusiastic about using it instead of needing to be convinced. And the larger the community is, the more likely Apple is to pay some attention to us. They were clearly blown away by how many people attended the WO sessions and as I recall there were comments about wanting to see the community grow from both the audience and the stage.
Invest in the existing open source WO community instead! If you have something to offer as far as WO future direction, this is the place to do it and make a difference. Wonder has 41 committers, WOProject/WOLips has 11. How many actually commit code on a regular basis? 3-4 people at the most. Not enough to start a foundation, but if you come and participate, this may change one year from now.
The best advice I can give here is that it needs to be as easy as possible for people to contribute. Lessons from the past once again; in my old life documentation had to be in Docbook format and basically ready to publish, so very few people wrote any unless they were being paid to do so. Likewise they keep trying to require test cases with every patch, so fewer and fewer of those are coming in. All the ideals in the world are no good if the barrier to entry is so high that the project can't sustain itself; IMHO it is better to make it easy for new contributors and have someone ready to work with them to improve the quality of their contribution than to send them away to perfect themselves. They usually don't come back.
janine _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Webobjects-dev mailing list (Webobjects-dev@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/webobjects-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to archive@mail-archive.com
