Ben, ultimately I'd like to be a part of the OpenACS 4 team, because it seems to just make sense to be part of a community of people developing a platform.
Unfortunately, getting there from here is still a little hard. I think that the fact that OpenACS supports Oracle is going to make the migration a lot easier (I don't have to port everything to both Postgres and OpenACS 4 at the same time).
I think once we get organized as a community, we should start developing a road map for getting all of us who want to get onto OpenACS 4. This will, of course, be beneficial for both the people already on OpenACS 4 and all of us stuck on ACS 3.4. We have a rough outline of a migration plan already (thank you, Andrew), and it looks like all of us could improve upon it and get ourselves all moved up to OpenACS 4. I think in the process we'll have to improve a lot of the modules available for OpenACS 4. For example, I will spend a lot of time getting the Intranet up to speed.
Ben, are we going to be able to prevent this migration gap from happening in the future? Is OpenACS 5 going to be totally incompatible with OpenACS 4? Are we even planning an OpenACS 5 at this point, with aD effectively out of the picture? Should I be starting a new thread for this?
It looks like the poll might not be necessary. Apparently, I misunderstood how different ACES was. If you all think it shouldn't break anything, let's start with that in the repository, and let's try to get a working ACS 3.5 going.
On the legal front, I'm trying to contact aD's lawyer to get an official blessing for us to use the name ACS 3.4. Otherwise, I propose we name is something else... Arsdigita Community System is okay, but we could probably do better. But I also don't want to distance the name from OpenACS, so we might just call it Classic ACS 3.5 or something similar.
