Great point, Malte.
I think we also need to give thought to why most of us are here in
the first place. I think one of the best points Philip Greenspun
ever made was that magnet content is what drives the success
of most websites.
CONTENT is what drove most of us to to ACS. Philip's book, the
ASJ articles, the great discussions on web/db.
I think what's happened is that we've reached a size that we're
pretty comfortable with. We have "enough" developers, we have
"enough" business. We're doing fine.
But we're not effectively reaching out towards
1) bringing new developers into the "fold". Malte and many of the
previous comments address this very well.
2) making new developers successfully grow into expert
developers. I think besides working on documentation, we also
need to make it as easy as possible for people to plug into
openacs as developers. We need documents that really explain
how to become a good developer, how to set up CVS and use it,
how to contribute to an open source project, how to make
patches, how to make bug reports, how to how to how to.
For us to concretely make a difference on these two issues, it's
going to take some work and time. I'm very encouraged to see
people stepping forward to help out on this.
I'll have a lot more time to devote to this once we eventually move
our ACS 3.4 based system to OpenACS (I'm thinking about
doing that at the beginning of next year).
Realistically, unless we change how we're doing things,
openacs will never be anything other than a fringe product.
Some questions new people are going to bring when they come
to the openacs.org website is:
- what does this toolkit do?
- why is it better than competing products?
- why is it worth my time to learn such a diverse body of new
things: Aolserver, Tcl, Postgres or Oracle? What does this buy
me?
- does this product have a future? What does it look like?
