[Vtigercrm-developers] vTiger on MSSQL - 99% complete.

Graham Miller graham901 at webenhanced.com.au
Tue Sep 25 16:21:11 PDT 2007


Enrico Weigelt wrote:
> 
> Well, as long as one person maintains the project, it keeps alive ;-P

That is true. But if a company is going to invest (say) $50,000 to improve a piece of software
so it is useable for their purpose, give back the improvements to the community, and continue to
assist and have a hand in its development over time, then the company would like to see an
active community from various industries and countries so that new technology is incorporated in
a timely fashion and well tested by a large community (of which the company becomes an active
member).

So for a large financial and time investment, we would want to be an active part of a reasonably
large community so we feel that we are helping plenty of others in return for the initial code
base and future updates, as well as benefiting ourselves from plenty of other people's
experience.

> IMHO, it's important to get patches back to this list asap,
> so the community can take care of them. That's the difference
> between cooperative work and taking someone's works for your
> own benefits.

Of course. But that should be done via some kind of tracker that allows file attachments.... not
a mailing list. And a lead developer should be responsible for merging that code into the
current branch.

We also contribute to the Moodle (learning management system) community and they have a huge
number of contributors and their systems are quite good. The feature request tracker has the
ability to have a conversation and upload code files for consideration. It allows linking to a
wiki where the "howto" documents are kept and naturally the wiki allows linking back to the
tracker for more detailed info (for developers). Other users can then gain access to patches for
(say) older releases that were used as a proof of concept during the development phase.

The forums are where issues are discussed until action is required. Then it goes to the tracker
and wiki.

We run our own (old version) gForge site for developer interaction and this works moderately
well. I am sure that a newer version would be more useful to a developer community. And we will
be investigating the upgrade for our own (closed user group) use shortly anyway. But for an open
source community project, it needs to be such that a person can register themselves and
participate in the trackers and forums etc. And under lead developer control, access the wiki
and perhaps even the source tree (once proven to be of suitable quality and skill level).

> For me, the sugar licensing was one of the major reason for
> dropping it. vtiger has still a lot issues, but still seemed
> the best option for me.

And we came to the same conclusion, but the lack of a cohesive community is what makes us stall
our decision. Single maintainer projects of this size rarely keep up to date with even security
issues, let alone technology upgrades and, of course, industry requirements.

If we are going to invest heavily in a technology, then we want to be using the "best of breed".

So this is why we hesitate.

Cheers
Graham




More information about the vtigercrm-developers mailing list