I support Don, and I do think he's a great leader. I've seen his work ever since OpenACS was a project hosted off birdnotes.net (his site, or whatever the domain was), where we had 3 people working.
Leaders have to take strong positions sometimes. It's part of the job, and it's not an esay job. C'mon guys, put yourself in our shoes. It's hard to manage all this stuff. There are a lot of things going on and many more come out every day. Just keeping track with all the new things, ideas, propositions, that come up in a day is a daunting task.
What Don is trying to do is make us stay focused, so we can get 4.x out the door. Once the core is stable and release, we'll have a great base to create exciting new packages, refine the core, improve performance, add searching capabilites. IF we get a core released. If we take 1 year to release, we'll lose momentum, and that's no good.
Don (and me, and Ben, and Dan) are also trying to cultivate a team spirit here, and avoid fragmentation. It's not easy. Suggestion and constructive criticism is good, but we also should support our leaders if they are doing the best they can and showing work. I can't say Don's not doing all this.
I also see what Jerry is trying to do, and I like it. Searching is great, and important. But given everything else that's going on, I hope he (and others in the community) will understand the direction that we're heading here. I hope everyone can see that it's a good direction for everyone, including Jerry, and everyone else that wants to support their families through OpenACS work.
So why don't we put our differences apart, roll-up our sleeves, and focus on the core? Of course, those wanting to work on other things (e.g. searching) are free to do so, but please help us to get a good, stable, core out. Help us get more people to work on the core.
Another very important thing that I've been wanting to get jump-started is a documentation project for 4.x. It'd give others who are not familiar with the code, something to pitch in.
Let's keep it together folks, and make OpenACS kick some serious butt.
