Re: WebObjects Foundation
Re: WebObjects Foundation
- Subject: Re: WebObjects Foundation
- From: email@hidden
- Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2006 00:29:24 -0700
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 :-)
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