Talli, this is an appropriate (excellent?) place for your rants, and I
rather enjoy them myself, but at LinuxWorld or whereever else it's
probably a good idea for you to supress your desire to slam Philip,
especially to people who know OpenACS only through him. Not out of
politness or anything like that, but simply as a practical matter for
the advancement of OpenACS.
AFAIK Philip has never been hostile to OpenACS, just uninterested.
And he's still teaching his
class at MIT
(now called 6.171), apparently along with
Andrew Grument
and
Ben Adida
as well. Names you surely recognize.
Philip
states
that more than 1,000 MIT students have gone through that class over
the years. That is a rather large number, right? How many
of those MIT programmers have since showed up here on openacs.org? A
much, much smaller number? Sounds suspiciously like OpenACS may not
be winning much mind-share among a group of students who
should be one of its no-brainer core constituencies.
Since Philip's students can use whatever toolkit they want now, most
of them must be choosing tools other than OpenACS. Likely us more
experienced folks could do them a favor by helping them avoid that
error. :)
Maybe we should try to hold some sort of OpenACS boot camp in the
Boston area before the semester starts, and invite all the upcoming
6.171 students to it as well? I know other people have expressed
interest in OpenACS bootcamps, so it wouldn't just be for the MITers.
Some kind of Knoppix CD with everything related to OpenACS alread
pre-installed and running could also be a very big win here...
