Thanks for the summary as to the proper marketing and documentation steps the community needs to take to make known the fact that our stuff can run behind Apache. All we need is someone who will not only summarize but take action to make it happen. Talli, perhaps?
"OACS has a reputation as being an outstanding closed system. It behooves the community to change that perception"
Why? The world runneth over with trendy lightweight web applications running over popular message APIs. Does this mean that the world of community websites based on a comprehensive datamodel is dead? I don't think so. Does this means our strategy of wanting to be the best in that world is the wrong strategy? I don't see why.
And trendy doesn't necessarily mean successful. Look at Craig's List ... some of the most primitive and untrendy community-building software on the planet, with a wretched UI. But look at that community and look at where it's taken Craig Newmark. And, oh wait, Craig's List seems to be pretty trendy today. People seem drawn to it. Could it be the fact that's its primitive UI is so dumb as to be impossible to misunderstand, and that its primitive community software support is just good enough?
Photo.net is no longer the pre-eminent photo website in the world, though it is still going strong.
However ... those sites which have come to be more popular, such as digital photo review ... are community websites, the same genre as photo.net and other ACS-derived community sites.
I don't see any evidence that demand for sites of this sort is slacking in any way. Yes, we need to be able to support popular APIs. As it happens we do support bi-direction RSS and webDAV and we will support more in the future. We're not quite as blind and stupid as you might think.
But OpenACS itself will always be an integrated toolset for building community sites. That's our niche. The other stuff you mention's cool and has its niche but it's not the entire world, no matter how exciting you find it.
