Re: WebObjects Foundation

[Ian Joyner]

On 16/08/2006, at 1:26 AM, Simon Mclean wrote: Hi My own personal suggestion would be for us to focus first on making the wiki the best damn WO resource it can possibly be, and to help out Mike with making WOLips the best damn plug-in it can be. Then take stock of how we are doing and add a few more things from Pascal's list, and so on. spot on. - the Foundation should buy some keywords on Google AdWords so that we can get more people on the Foundation's site Any talk of Google Adwords frightens me. How did you hear about ruby on rails ? python ? tapestry ? struts ? Was it that you stumbled on a Google Adword, or was it the buzz generated by the respective communities and the knock on reviews on cnet, slashdot and wired ? I agree about Adwords, and perhaps the proof is that Microsoft wants to get into this (mainly to kill Google). But then I'm a very anti-ad person and seeing an ad will make me more likely to boycott a product, but I seem to be in a small minority of people who will actually research purchases. They are all vying for your attention from spam, to pop up ads during programs on TV, and now maybe all over your computer. It's good to get a buzz about technology. I remember Doug Lea (of Java concurrency fame) saying years ago that Java had taken off with little or no need of promotion (well I think Sun might have promoted it a bit). But then buzz does not mean quality, merely quantity. It used to be that the computing field was somewhat scientific in that research would be done and papers submitted to relevant forums. Not a perfect way of doing things because even these forums had their bias (note that OOPSLA became mainly a Java/C++ thing, and TOOLS was started up as a reaction to that), although some good stuff seems to have come out of OOPSLA in relation to Java, notably generics, although years overdue, whereas C++ is still a basket case. Blogs are just a way of people being able to publish with no review process. Maybe democratic, but the outcome of which way opinion tips is fairly random and not usually in favour of best technologies. Well, some good things can come out, and let's hope WO can survive and continue to grow in this brave new environment. But mostly my experience is that good technologies are crushed. Here's some fun: Try a google blog search on ruby on rails, limited to posts in the last day: http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&q=ruby+on+rails&ie=UTF-8&as_drrb=q&as_qdr=d ... you'll find about 30 reponses - the vast majority being technical posts by people using and loving the technology. then do the same for webobjects: http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=webobjects&as_drrb=q&as_qdr=d .... you'll get a dismal 4 or so responses - most (if not all) will be nothing to do with the technology, but happen to include a link to the iTunes music store !! I think the community can generate more WO hype by just blogging more, or contributing content to the wiki, than we could ever do through an ad campaign. and blogging doesn't burn large holes in ones finances, unlike adwords ... Simon In principle, I like the idea. But I have some experience with this that I feel I should share. The open source project we are moving away from has been saying all these things for *years*. If you changed just a few details in Pascal's message and posted it over in their discussion, forum no-one would ever spot any difference. The reasons why nothing has gotten done are many and complex, and involve personalities and such, and so are probably not 100% applicable here. But there are some lessons that are useful, and I think the main one is that a community of diverse people and small companies can't just create something as substantial and organized as a Foundation out of thin air. It would be nice if it could be done, but it just doesn't seem to work. No one person or group can contribute enough to really get things off the ground, and so you end up in endless discussions about how we "should" do this or that. Most of the open source projects that are really successful have one of two things: a company backing the effort (Redhat, for example) or a founding contributor with a strong personality (our own Anjo makes a good example :). In order for projects to be successful and have everyone rowing in the same direction, you need strong leadership, whether it's paid for by the sponsoring company in the form of project management or comes from actual ownership of the codebase. And we know that Apple is not going to be involved in this (in fact, that's the point) so it's up to us to provide that leadership. We need to give people a way and a reason to feel pride in ownership before they are going to really give of their time and resources in the way this project is going to need. I think that the scenario Pascal describes is a good one, but should be considered a future goal. I think we should start small and work up, letting the organization develop. People are more likely to invest their time and money into something that already has proven value, and a Foundation composed of people who have already been working together and have a plan will be a lot stronger and more likely to succeed than one that has no, err, foundation. :) My own personal suggestion would be for us to focus first on making the wiki the best damn WO resource it can possibly be, and to help out Mike with making WOLips the best damn plug-in it can be. Then take stock of how we are doing and add a few more things from Pascal's list, and so on. If you still want to go for the Foundation right away, I will help out as long as the feeling of deja vu is not too strong. :) janine On Aug 14, 2006, at 10:44 PM, Pascal Robert wrote: Ok, let's start talking about a WebObjects Foundation (or Alliance, or whatever). Why do we need such a thing ? The Foundation will be responsible to market WO, collecting money to help speed up the development of open source tools (Entity Modeler, etc.) and to have an unified voice to communicate with Apple. It will help all WO people to get to know each other, find resources and tracking bugs. On which model ? The Mozilla Foundation and the Apache Software Foundation are the best examples of a working foundation. Give me more details. For marketing, we had those ideas : - create a list of all Foundation members so that people can see that many people are actually using WO for interessing applications - create some hype by going to conferences like O'Reilly's Web 2.0 so that we can show that WO is actually cool, but also better and more mature than solutions like PHP and Ruby On Rails - the Foundation should buy some keywords on Google AdWords so that we can get more people on the Foundation's site - convince Apple to link to the Foundation site For bug tracking : - create a tool where people can add their Radar bugs, and find bugs submitted by other people. It should be possible for people to vote on bugs that they also have,  this way we will be able to report the more important bugs to Apple - we can also use the same tools to track bugs for tools created by the community Donations : - donations should be possible to help financing open source tools development, to organize the future WO conference (WOConf) and to pay for fees like the Foundation's Web site and Google AdWords Software : - approve versions of open-source tools for production use, maybe also creating complete packages with various tools You have other ideas ? You want to participate in the creation of the Foundation ? You think that's it a bad idea ? Please reply :-)  _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. 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