Forum OpenACS Q&A: Any comment from the community?

I've also had to weather much of the LAMP criticism I hosted the http://lampsig.org in my office for over 2 years and finally kinda gave up because it was turning out to be a widget fest where most of the people didn't have a interest in enterprise level development.

I will remember what you have suggested and check it out in the various circles that I run in. I'm very curious to know what's doing with naviserver since I worked with them before AOL purchased the browser and as far as I can tell, did nothing with the publishing parts which were quite useful to me. I would like to see oacs do a good job of pre-press since the market is wide open with quark, InDesign and Scribus being the consumer apps that most people use.

I did see where the was some talk about using the TEX engine, which would work very well for me since I have a good friend who is a tex expert but It seems to have died some few years ago.

It's stupid because it lists symptoms and doesn't address the core issue. This makes it also a bit dissapointing because you have been around since the beginning and are still adressing the wrong points.

THE CORE ISSUE IS DEFINE AS FOLLOWS: the key developers are billed out at 100%.

Thats it. No more no less. Core devs are busy paying the bills and working on complicated OPENACS based projects, and can only spare a few hours here beyond that. If you waste a single sentence beyond this, you are simply listing symptoms of that core issue. This is nothing unique to openacs, all projects suffer from this, just look at Vista and the royal disaster that has turned out to be from a company that CAN afford full time devs. I can pick appart any of your PHP based examples in a nanosecond if you like based on the same grounds we are critiquing oacs.

Yes I am giving you a bit of a hard time, mostly because your article does nothing to help the situation.

PUTTING MY WALLET WHERE MY MOUTH IS:

Please allow me to take the opportunity to engage you and see if we can work together on some of these issues. Here is my plan for contributing to the project and I am slowly achieving it:

1. I started out on the Documentation project with Torben, however it turned out that the doc project is so big that two people aren't enough firstly, and secondly we need a project manager tool to co-ordinate the effort.

2. Therefore that project is still ongoing but stalled for the moment as I have doubled back to do the following:

a) I have hired a programmer to help me propose a redesign of the website using off the shelf oacs components. We have it done, I just need to finish up some graphics and we would like to present it to OCT for evaluation and critique. Then after a few rounds of making sure everyone is happy we hope to publish an updated website. In other words, instead of publicly listing ONLY NEGATIVES (all projects have a balance sheet of positives and negatives ... listing only negatives is a VERY VERY BIG NO NO from a marketing standpoint ... congratulations you just did it to your own favourite project), I put my wallet where my mouth is and hired someone to help. *HINT* *HINT*

b) the goal of the redesign is twofold: slightly updated look and also we want to show what a user can get out of the box with oacs WITHOUT any programming.

c) a tertiary goal of the website update is to allow us a place to mount calendar visibly so we can schedule group events.

d) another goal of the website is to allow us to mount project manager on the website visibly for those projects and users that want it. It should allow us to manage large projects more effectively. Primarily pm is meant to let me and torben co-ordinate the documenation project BECAUSE it requires a lot of people working on small chunks of data at a time. Two guys is not enough, we need 20 to 40 people picking up a couple of pages a piece and working on them and only pm can allow us to track that, any other approach is a disaster. However, pm can be used by other projects, some of which you have listed.

e) once we have shown what you can get from oacs with a default install we will try to convince OCT to invest time and resources to make sure with the install of one metapackage we can get nice published website out of the door for a user. This will be our first ease of use project to be done.

f) once we have that done I intend to, with the permission of OCT, to engage EVERYONE ... and i mean EVERYONE on the openacs registered list. I don't care if most of them are spam bots and addys that don't exist. I would like to engage whoever is awake in the community or still keeps an eye out there to help out with documentation. The documenation project needs 20 to 40 people to work on updates and re-organization under the leadership of one project manager (currently thats torben, but i'm co-ordinating with him).

g) the next goal ease of install. There are three projects right now under way for this:

FIRST: source install ... i have one master bash script that uses Maltes install scripts to download EVERYTHIGN from source and install it with one command. Malte has requested i forward that to him, he will package everything up into one giant tar that includes all the sources as a reference and that way we can even offer installs either from cvs or publish specific source reference releases.

SECOND: Debian packaging. There are several projects under way to package oacs and oacs apps for debian. This needs to be followed up on, however worst case scenario, we can always modify my and Maltes scripts to just spit out debs.

THIRD: I have a reference debian base vmware image sitting right here. I use it to test oacs source installs and use it to run my own oacs installs. Now because I am a novice I am not comforteable releaseing a preinstalled oacs debian vmware image but i can do it in about the time it takes to upload it to oacs. I would say this should come last after the scripts and debian packages tho.

h) once we have those pieces in place THEN and ONLY THEN we go out and start making some noise in the greater community. Until we can provide support services to the greater developer community (by this i mean for $$'s ... i know this is available its just not presented properly on the website) and meet some obligations on a time and delivery basis doing a rah rah sort of deal will only bite us in the ass BEACUSE ... well because your article is really WHY it will bite us in the ass. Developers tend to look at a project superficially and from their own 'I need it now' perspective - the bias tends to be that because there is a precieved notion that its hard to get into therefore it is. The exact opposite is true however we haveto polish off the speed bumps a bit first for easier entry.

So, thats what I'M doing to help.

How can we collaborate to continue pushing OPENACS forward? And yes I too am 100% billed out and have no time to spare ... heh! But your help would greatly be appreciated on ANY of the above.

Feel free to contact me via IRC on #freenode (nick: holycow), or via email.

- Rob

Moving to naviserver is an option, but at the moment, who has the time to test it? Gustaf did this at some time so he would probably be able to give a good introduction what he found out.

As for moving stuff out of OpenACS, feel free to do it. I guess we have enough on our hands to get stuff into OpenACS to think about abstracting stuff and get it out 😊.

No need to start a flame war. OpenACS is a niche product which allows us especially with the latest version of xotcl-core, to really go wild and quickly develop applications. But it is a niche product and if it werent for ]po[, aims, xo* we could just call it .LRN. And I would strongly ask the .LRN crew to think outside the box and make sure (before releasing) that things still work outside .LRN.

We did a mistake with the 5.3.1 release especially with regards to the large amount of changes that needed to be done there. Hopefully a lesson has been learned and we can clean up the situation by the 5.4 release.

I realize you are the greatest fucking developer in the world. Even wrote some compilers.

I wasn't going to point out in public that you are the reason for many defections in the OACS community. Your fucked up, my way or the fucking highway attitude.

BTW, I have offered my input,more than once, it was roundly ignored. Like many others who left the community.

I offered money to redo ecommerce. No takers. So don't talk shit. The emphasis is on dotLRN, if that is where your future is have fun.

Yes I know, Gustaf has nowhere near the great programming skills of the great Don Baccus, and his "shit" is the only killer app OACS ever had, too bad.

Don't bother to reply, as I said, I am done with OACS. Have fun being the tyrant in your tiny world.

Now to the topic at hand: You are the prime guardian against whatever I come up with. You stop me before I TIP certain processes. You are the one who threatens to veto things, so please bear with me for saying that you stopped that process. And yes, your opinion carries more weight, but does it really matter to me?

I mean, why are you guys (and this includes some others like Tom Jackson and Frank Bergmann, to name the most serious culprits in my opinion) always trying to make a power game out of it. We are all in this because of a believe that the niche product OpenACS stands a chance to earn us money. The more energy is focused on bitching between core team members the weaker the toolkit will get.

Unless you haven't noticed, we should not be so arrogant to assume that we can loose people just because we do not like them. The code contribution is crucial and the number of people that really understand what is going on in OpenACS is decreasing steadily. And you have a tendency to pick "fights" and threaten to make someone your "enemy" with those people that actually do a lot to keep OpenACS afloat. I am just going to point out three of us that are still contributing.
- Frank, who is very successful and the prime contributor to OpenACS installations around the world (which we could easily verify i we only had some way of tracking that. But I could take the code from ]po[ for that, if there is interest).
- Gustaf, who has written some of the coolest applications in OpenACS and is a very valuable source in making at least my live much easier (to give a recent example: ]po[ did not have the function_args defined, which prevented xotcl from generating the class functions. Within four hours since my e-mail he wrote a script that took the PG catalog and created the SQL statements so I could us XoTCL xo::db::sql::im_project new instead of the PL/SQL. And that was on a Sunday.).
- Myself. Though you might argue about my value to the community, but I let people decide on that. What I can say though is that I am probably the only one who is working and has seen the code from the all the major OpenACS applications and products and worked with most of the OpenACS companies out there. So I get a pretty good overview where they are at, how they are struggling and why the contribution to OpenACS is, well, limited.

Therefore, could you please check your attitude before posting to the forums as the style is really offensive and when outsiders look at the founder of the project posting like you do they won't see OpenACS in the good light that it deserves. And sorry for being sometimes a little bit frustrated with you personally but you are the guardian against most of my ideas and I don't think it makes sense for me to put everything into a TIP. I love to have beer with and talk about the future of the project. And I don't mind having a strong and opposing opinion on some points. But I don't want to spend the energy on fighting and as it really isn't that important to me anymore I will just have it your way.

A guy once said why his marriage broke: "I was too tired for apologizing". And, to be honest, I am at that point, so I should probably stop caring that much where the community is going as a whole and just help with my knowledge those companies which use OpenACS to make an impact.

So, do I want you to be my enemy: No.
Does it matter if you decide to be it: Not really.

Gustaf has long said he has no interest in supporting Oracle.

And his shit is BSD, rather than GPL.

Now, recently, Gustaf has been encouraged to support Oracle

(Jon: read ... MONEY)

The platform situation has changed by the nice people from UNED who gave me access to their Oracle installation. On my side, I have developed an easy-to-maintain SQL layer. I did not receive *any* money for any of this work, i did this out of personal interest. Actually, nobody even encouraged me to provide oracle support (there was actually more discouragement). I have learned something during developing this layer, and i think the results are quite good.

Don, please don't talk about things that you don't know. And thanks for the clear words what you think about my contributions.

I mean, why are you guys (and this includes some others like Tom Jackson and Frank Bergmann, to name the most serious culprits in my opinion) always trying to make a power game out of it. We are all in this because of a believe that the niche product OpenACS stands a chance to earn us money. The more energy is focused on bitching between core team members the weaker the toolkit will get.

Wow! How exactly do I make a power game out of anything? The only power here is committed code. If by a power game, you mean that I complain loudly when you and others force everyone else to follow your mostly ill-conceived code, okay. At some point everyone just gives up and says okay, just do it. Everytime I install a new OpenACS system, my original packages need to be modified, even though they only use the most basic conventions in OpenACS.

This is a great way to drive folks away, because if they ever decide to upgrade, they discover the pain involved and that gives them the opportunity to try something else.

But I guess simply informed comment from me, a user of OpenACS, is a power game. Why should users be able to comment? Should only developers who contribute code have a say? What if the developers are morons? Contributing moron code doesn't earn any points from the user perspective. Contributions which force users to do unnecessary work doesn't earn any points either.

If I was into a power game, I would be trying to commit all my code instead of talking about it as an example. But I agree with the community standards: pick one way of doing things and go with that. Remember that standard? Well it went out the window a long time ago, and Don has probably given up reminding everyone about it. Don actually has to be nice from time to time and work with people with different agendas. Usually I don't.

If I step over the line, someone lets me know, usually in terms like those above. Hey, usually they are right.

My working theory is that OpenACS core has issues, but it was put together pretty well. It works. Any change has the potential to make it not work. Developers who try to minimize this fact are dangerous. Developers who fail to consider the impact of their changes on current users are dangerous. Developers who think developers are more important than users are dangerous.

Power means you can force someone to do something they would rather not do. One way to do that here is to commit code which forces others to do work. Another way is to be able to prevent such changes. But, you can always make changes to your own copy, so this type of power doesn't prevent anyone from doing what they want.

- i think flames are actually healthy :)

- they don't always result in a positive ending however it really does clear the throat and lets people come out from underneath the comfort blanket of 'lets all get along'.

- in Dons defense it think at least a FEW of you REALLY misunderstand him ... well just Jon really. If anyone in the community has left because of Don, thats a bit of a giggle actually :)

Jon, I appreciate your comments and your input. It was poorly framed, poorly thought out, and you didn't even take the courtesy to drop by OCT and speak your mind IN WHICH case I would of said hi and introduced my self.

However, as was noted, the list is valid, its known, it's being adressed.

While it might be a waste of your time please check out my redesign and forward your thoughts. Posting on the general forum shortly.

Gustaf, big kudos to you on the xotcl front, that is one fantastic piece of work!

As per comments, the website mockup is up, please check out this thread and comment ... Jon especially you!

https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message%5fid=1200566