[Vtigercrm-developers] An Impassioned Plea from an VTiger Integrator

Matthew Brichacek mmbrich at fosslabs.com
Wed Jul 12 08:16:41 PDT 2006


On Wed, 2006-07-12 at 10:48 -0300, Sergio A. Kessler wrote:
> Mat,
> 
> v4.x would not be abandoned while there is people interested in
> maintaining it, that's all needed in open source, interested and
> executive people...
> it can be mantained forever while this condition is met...
It could, but I just don't see it happening after 5.x is stable and
usable.  This is just my opinion based on past experience.

> 
> and I agree with you that there was (is ?) an utterly lack of
> receptive response to community developers from the core team, and the
> project was crying for a fork, but all those people creating private
> forks also lacked the balls to create a serious *public* fork...
> 
> I mean, if you are going to fork, then fork in all it's glory...
Because maintaining a proper OSS project with little to no support from
the community (and abandoning the core team) is no small task, esp. when
the boss is breathing down your neck to get X,Y,Z features enabled ASAP.
Other things.. the community was building quickly, features were
storming into the forums (even though they didn't get used) and the code
was a complete cluster fuck.  The pros of a fork barely outweighed the
benefits and for mere mortal to come along and try to tackle it would
have been near suicidal.
Also, in some cases the choice to fork may have been the career saving
moment after the boss found out you decided to deploy the company on
project that was abandoned over night with no warning or word of upgrade
paths, bug fixes, etc.

> 
> those people that never submitted a patch, never figthed for more open
> development, created their own private branch, and then came up here
> whining, are ... well, whiners IMO
Most of them did submit patches and fought for more open development and
when they were ignored simply took their patches and went home.  Some of
us were a little more vocal about it but the only reason that worked is
because the critical mass needed to make a real change had already built
up from the people who came before us.
This really was my point in the last thread.  I would normally agree
with you 100% on this issue but I think this project had a period where
there was a sign on the front door saying "Open for business..
Developers Welcome.. and Trespassers will be ignored (or shot)" all in
the same breath.

> 
> those who want to mantain v4.x just need to step up and do something about it...
My argument wasn't really for 4.x maint.  I think the current
maintainers are doing a fine job of keeping the release afloat for the
community (no thanks to me mind you).  My point was that we should find
a way to welcome these wayward forks back to the fold.  How?  I dunno..
but I think it's worth investigating as I am pretty sure that many many
private vtiger4.x forks are floating about.  Personally I am going
gangbusters to try and get all of our 4.x features into 5.x since I
despise being forked from a project but asking all of these integrators
to do that is not nice, nor is it standard operating procedure for an
OSS project.. I firmly believe that much less of this would have
happened if this project was following a true OSS format during the 4.x
devel and hadn't gone off half-cocked to start 5.x.  Do I think 5.x was
worth the wait and headache of what happened to 4.x?  Not even remotely
close, we could have added smarty, campaigns and all the AJAX fluff to
4.x in less time IMO.

So after the wind clears.. my point really comes down to getting all
these folks who are working on private forks to come back to the
community project, regardless of their justification (or lack of) for
the fork. In an OSS project your most valuable resource is your
developers and if we can find a way to get them back it will be well
worth it IMHO.


Matt




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