Re: WebObjects Foundation
Re: WebObjects Foundation
- Subject: Re: WebObjects Foundation
- From: Chuck Hill <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2006 14:36:28 -0700
IMHO, any sort of paid advertising would be a waste of money. Like
Simon says (sorry, too tempting to resist) we need more
presentations, blogs, articles, websites, demos etc. We need to get
the knowledge of what WO is, what is can do, and why someone might
want to use it out there.
Chuck
On Aug 15, 2006, at 8:26 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 ?
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 :-)
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