Apple

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 :-)