Jeff touches on something I want to emphasize. In the past year or so we've achieved our goal of moving AWAY from monolithic releases of the entire toolkit. Short term, that probably makes OpenACS look less reliable from a release scheduling point of view than before. Realistically, though, given our limited resources it has greatly increased our ability to push through incremental point-point releases of the core in reasonable time. Once we finish our big 5.2 push I think we'll be on track to push forward with a more agressive release schedule (many changes have been accumulating in what will be 5.2 for a year now, so testing/fixing will be a bigger chore, we hope to avoid such massive-scale changes between releases in the future).
As Jeff says, we certainly don't have the resources to synch .LRN packages releases at the same time. While all packages are in our CVS tree, and while many are shared (forums, etc), their are substantial packages which, as Jeff says, are of NO USE outside the .LRN environment and the consortium MUST be responsible for maintenance. Those members of our community who, like Jeff, have little interest in selling to the academic e-learning market have no motivation to fix packages like LORS.
On the other hand, of course, .LRN benefits from the fact that many of the packages (forums, calendar, etc) are of direct use outside the .LRN marketplace and our community will continue to enhance/fix them whether or not the .LRN consortium is involved.
I'm going to split my response into a couple of posts to keep things manageable...
