Hey Adam, welcome back!!!
It's great to see your posts again. We've definitely missed your voice.
Adam said: As a guide, we might look at projects that are achieving similar ends as OpenACS like phpgroupware (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=7305); It's been downloaded in excess of 7,000 times in two months, with no marketing budget, or affiliation with a larger firm. Just word-of-mouth.
I agree that we should definitely be looking at how other OSS packages have positioned themselves for greater awareness. Unfortunately, we don't have the buzzword compliance that PHP does. I imagine that if we changed the name to "OpenACS doesn't use PHP" we would get more traffic just because those three letters are in the title.
However, now that there is another competing open source app-dev package out there, I do think it's important to consider how OpenACS is different and why it is preferred for particular, if not all, kinds of systems.
Personally, I have begun to describe the ACS as a system that whose philosophy has always focused on the user first and foremost. That is, the ACS was developed not to build address books and CMS and bulletin boards because those are solved problems. Rather, we beleive that the real problem is how to manage a users contribution for each and every application that has been implemented in the system. As a result, the primary relationship for the ACS is how the content is arranged vis a vis the user. This is completely opposite the approach of a package like Zope which for the most part focuses on content as the primary relationship is how the user interacts with the content.
For most of the gigs that I have come across, the ACS approach is far better. A CMS system can be implemented in the ACS that is reasonable in competition with Zope, but I question anyone that says Zope can compete with ACS in managing users. I can't argue about how PHPgroupware works because I haven't played with it, but I didn't see anything in their docs that argued this.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure that we have anything in our docs either. One of the reasons I am so happy to see this discusion (and the other about marketing that Rafael started) is that we, as a community and in particular the companies, need to think of ways to compete with the other packages.
I don't think that we gain anything by renouncing our relationship with aD. As a member of one of the OpenACS community's I rather like feeding off the sharks scraps. However, as a member of the open source community, I do understand the desire.
Very soon, I am going to try and write a competive analysis about Zope vs. OpenACS. (Caveat: I do think Zope is a good product, but for another problem.) I think that other people in the community who want to see OpenACS flourish ought to consider doing similar things that would be included in the docs but are not entirely technical. Similar to what aD did, but not so damn heavy on the corporate speak.
These are just some ideas. I am eager to see responses.
talli
