Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to OpenForce's commitment to the OpenACS free software community

Important points:
  • my original posting has nothing to do with my opinion of the dotLRN governance issue, which I was waiting to resolve with Al before publicy discussing.

  • Don, if you have no issues to point out, then I have no answer to provide. If you have some "rationalizations" in mind, then I'm sure you know what issues these were supposedly refering to (I sure don't). The only reason I brought this up publicly is because you've been bringing it up privately, causing divisiveness privately, and refusing to hear my technical opinion privately.

Now, I'd like to address Dave's points which are clear and which are very helpful to my understanding of the situation.

  • new-portal. OpenForce has always developed this to be OpenACS- dependent and not dotLRN-dependent. I never advocated that new- portal should be dotLRN-dependent. One of my private emails was grossly misquoted on the issue, which understandably led to this misunderstanding. What I advocated was the idea that new-portal shouldn't be distributed with the base OpenACS tarball and stuffed down every developer's throat, because I believe that is serious bloat. I suggested distributing it separately, as an independent package. I went back on this decision after I realized that, given current OpenACS architecture, this would make people's life more complicated, not less. That said, I'm still very worried about OpenACS bloat.

  • new Tcl procs: we cleaned up a lot of the Tcl API but we never deprecated old procs, we made sure they were always functional. We tried to give as much help as possible to point this out, but we probably didn't do enough. We'll work more towards that, this makes a lot of sense.

  • documentation: yes, we have not documented as much as we should have. It's very difficult under client deadlines to do so. That said, we've provided as much person-to-person help as possible. We've offered our help to MuseaTech, Furfly, and Collaboraid in case they hit any snags. We'll work harder on this, this point also makes sense.

  • generally increased communication: we'll work harder on that, too. I think this is a general problem that we all have, apart from the few courageous documentation gurus like Roberto and Vinod, without whom we would have code and no docs.
Dave: your comments are not at all interpreted as an attack. On the contrary, I find them helpful. It's helped me identify one massive miscommunication (new-portal), and a few points where we should do a better job (generally communication and documentation).