Let's first segment the universe into a couple of buckets:
1. People who've seen the light & run OpenACS (means they run AOLserver already)
2. People who run the worlds best webserver (AOLserver) but don't currently use OpenACS
3. People who aren't running OpenACS, aren't running AOLserver, but are willing to switch to AOLserver to run OpenACS
4. People who aren't running OpenACS, aren't running AOLserver, and for whatever reason (real or imagined) aren't (yet) willing to leave foo brand webserver
5. People who aren't running OpenACS, aren't running AOLserver, and would never want to
This is good, because Michael Cleverly's making a
marketing argument (as is Lars, essentially). Moving away from AOLserver only makes sense as a fix for our presumed inability to market the existing platform (I'm assuming Dan's nsjava efforts and other efforts to improve our ability to quickly integrate with new technology continues to move forward).
So the real issue, given that those in group four above are the only who would be impacted by some sort of kludged-up AOLserver platform, is "how badly do we want these people?"
Put crassly, "how much are we willing to pay to get these people?"
Where the resource being consumed isn't necessarily money but volunteer developer resources as well.
Meanwhile, we have folks like Ben Koot pointing out that in many places OpenACS 4 still sucks. (my words, not his, but it's an excellent example of the lack of polish in OpenACS 4).
We're arguing about whether or not to devote resource to something like a brand new mod_nsd while the toolkit itself still is absolutely horrible in some places and moderately messed up in many others? I'm having a real problem understanding the prioritization that this implies. We need to sharpen our focus, folks, and fix it before we spend too much time worrying about where it will run.
