Forum OpenACS Development: Re: Porting Project/Open (Intranet Module) to OpenACS 5.0

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Posted by Don Baccus on
As far as commercial thoughts being unpleasant ... a large percentage of the people here are making their living out of the project.  We're not at all allergic to commercial thought.

On the other hand there's a great deal of loyalty to the open source model and the GPL here.  Not all the work we do is GPL'd of course ... but thus far community members writing code for distribution have GPL'd that code.  Strictly custom code tends to not get distributed, while distributed code is released under the GPL.  Thus far this model has worked well enough for the community.

I'm not suggesting that another model will be rejected out of hand, but will say I think you may find convincing the community of the need might be an uphill battle.

As far as there being "thought police" ... the project does have coding and design standards for work we bless.  We have a formal process for making community decisions as to how we expect code to be written if it is to be included as part of our project - the TIP process.

This is not some sort of radical concept - most engineering projects and software companies have such standards, and the development and use of such standards is considered a mark of professionalism by many.

So, no, you don't have to conform to our recommended practices - we have no way of forcing you to do so.

But if you don't, your work won't be accepted as part of the community software.

I don't mean that as a threat, just a statement of reality.  Indeed with some of the stuff you're talking about it may not matter - since we only accept GPL'd code into the project and you're talking about not GPL'ing at least part of your work, for that code it's moot.

But this cuts both ways - if you don't integrate your code with the toolkit, then you'll find it very difficult to integrate new work we do with your stuff.  Which again may not matter to you.