Hi Frank,
one of the problems I see within the OpenACS community is a tendency for free riding among some of the members. This is in itself okay, though with the advent of 5.3 we at least hope to figure out who is using the system.
On the other hand we have people who write wonderful applications on top of OpenACS and talk about them in detail, but sadly neither to commit their changes (like: "Now Form Builder allows us to automatically integrate metadata changes in our edit screens.") or give a pointer on where to download the sourcecode.
There are usually a ton of reasons why the latter do not release the code or make it easily available, but one of the ideas of an OpenSource Project is to write code and give it back. And if the steering comittee (in our case the OCT) is not happy with the changes, they can prevent them from happening or suggest improvals.
So I'd highly encourage any member of the community to give back code that they have written so others can take a look at it, reuse it in their solutions and generally work with it. It is in your own interest, as a fork generally makes it harder to maintain your code and you will not be able to profit from the experience of the OpenACS community as a whole. Well, that is unless your ego is high enough to believe that the experience of the community as a whole is lower than your own 😊.
