<p><i>As for the state of the community, our OpenACS bboard
traffic keeps increasing, our number of users is growing
polynomially, and progress on the port is booming thanks to as
many as 15-20 hard-core contributors. All efforts, including the
MuseaTech socials, are to be credited for these awesome
results. I'm not sure where you see the community being
unstable or having growth issues. </i></p>
<p>And therein lies the problem. OpenACS has done a great job
of evangelizing developers--so good a job that the pool of
developers seems to be growing much faster than the pool of
ACS clients. Successful growth is sometimes a lot harder to
manage than stagnation.</p>
<p>Now, there remain two questions to be answered. First,
what, if anything can the community do about this problem?
Second, even if we <b>can</b> do something, should we? (This
second question speaks, in part, to the ethical question raised
earlier about carving up markets for individual vendors and partly
to the question of whether the community is the most efficient
vehicle for growing the market.)</p>
<p>While I'm not convinced that the remedy for this growth
problem is a committee, I think there <b>are</b> things the
community can and should do. It's not that far a leap to go from
talking about the software we want *for* clients to describing that
software *to* clients (and, more importantly, prospective clients).
To the extent that it is possible to collaborate on software that is
useful to the entire community (including clients), it ought to be
possible to articulate the benefits. As Janine points out, Zope
has done a good job of this and it has been to the benefit of
Zope shops everywhere (I'm guessing, though I have no
proof).</p>
<p>Certainly, the community can't deliver clients to the vendors
on a silver platter; nor should we even if we could. But there's a
big range between that and where we are now. I'm not sure what
the solution is yet, but I feel pretty confident that we have a
serious and well-defined problem.</p>
