Well, its a bit out of character for me to be honest. *blush*
Perhaps a split may not be such a bad thing, as I mentioned I don't think that the fact that something is 'OpenACS based' carries a lot of weight anyway. My hunch is that the reason people use it is because its a useful tool and it would continue to be so regardless of the size of the community. Its a tool I'd like to be able to keep in my kitbag (even if its a specialist tool)
The pg community seems annoyed at having to support oracle, and thats probably natural. If you're using PG you are unlikely to be solving any serious problems anyway so perhaps the gain from Oracle is seemingly small.
Anyway, lets face it, as you say, the current community hardly looks professional which has probably hampered OpenACS in the enterprise environment anyway.
Ok, here's my suggestion. Lets just make it a clean break. A new name, a new site, and a new focus (i.e. not just building wesites).
The existing oracle users will have an uncluttered environment in which to support their product and perhaps it will find a new lease of life.
If not, well, it didn't really cost much anyway ...
And besides I think OraACS has some opportunities around agility, testing, integration, web services and so forth.. without the contraints of PG we can actually START TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF ORACLE. We'd get things like
XML parsing.
SOAP.
Java integration.
Distributed computing (with 10g)
Proper performance
Real marketing. Oracle has clout, PG has enthusiasts.
etc
all for FREE. We could actually massively increase what we can do by dropping PG support. I think the community has missed the point. All the concessions over the past few years have been the other way around. It PG that has compromised ACS not the other way around...
You can now develop with Oracle for free. Its your customers that pay for it.. not you.
and we could stop this nonsense of trying to move everything from the database into the scripts.
and stop worrying about that horrid .xql business, query dispatcher and so on..
we could *really* take advantage of being able to use Oracle specifics.
And top of my list we could support using Oracle result sets and Object Types.
And I could use a proper database that I can employ people to use, that companies understand and trust and that actually appeals to management...
after all, originally the Greenspun drive was to make use of the database, not hide from it.
The future's bright, the future's Oracle.
