24 Jul
2012
24 Jul
'12
3:17 p.m.
Vincent,
I freely admit that I did indeed form conclusions prematurely, complicated
by the happenstance that I picked precisely the wrong point in time to
evaluate the community (during your seminar). Given the responses on this
thread and the resources you have referenced I now find the XWiki project to
be extremely appealing from a developer's standpoint. I thank you, and the
others on this thread, for taking the time to straighten me out.
My current plan is to "give back" in some significant fashion. I am an
exception to your typical contributor, and this will hopefully work to the
community's benefit (but only time will tell). I am a "retired" software
engineer, and I am still driven to architect (my true speciality) and code
simply to exercise my mind and create things of "beauty." This is how I
choose to spend my retirement, and I have no other time-consuming
activities. So, being by nature obsessive-compulsive, immersive, and highly
productive, whatever "hobby" I pick (XWiki) will receive my
more-than-full-time attention, on a long term basis.
Of course, I have my own special areas of interest when it comes to XWiki,
even if they are not driven by currently recognized requirements. The one
that is foremost in my thinking at this time is semantic content. The good
news/bad news about this interest is that it will undoubtedly lead to
clashes with the current WikiModel. I see from your posts that you
personally see the model as the last (?) remaining core piece that needs
re-architecting. I will not presume to say that I can be of any help here,
but I will indeed be looking into it once I have completely absorbed the
existing architecture of the entire XWiki platform. But first I have to get
the darned system built :-)
--Gary
-----Original Message-----
From: devs-bounces(a)xwiki.org [mailto:devs-bounces@xwiki.org] On Behalf Of
Vincent Massol
Sent: Tuesday, July 24, 2012 12:31 AM
To: XWiki Developers
Subject: Re: [xwiki-devs] Are Outside Developers Really Welcome?
Hi Gary,
Since you're not the first one to ask I've created a FAQ entry about this:
http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/FAQ/What+is+the+relationship+between+XWi
ki+SAS+and+the+XWiki+open+source+project
Hope you'll find the information you were looking for inside and that you'll
be reassured that we are completely the opposite of what you initially
thought (we strive very hard to NOT be a closed open source and make every
effort to be what I call a "real open source project", i.e. a
community-based open source project.
If you see any deviation from this please point them out. It seems to me
that you confused the way we work with the fact that you didn't get any fast
reply to your question and you jumped to a bit hasty conclusions ;)
Generally speaking (excluding the Seminar thing), the reasons people answer
faster to some people than others:
* They know each other from their previous work in the community and thus
have built respect and the person getting replied to has **contributed**
back to the community thus establishing this level of intimacy/confidence
* They know the topic and can thus answer
* How the questions are phrased, how long the question is, and how easy they
are to be answered
* ah yes. also. the phase of the moon. ;)
Thanks
-Vincent
On Jul 23, 2012, at 11:24 PM, Gary Kopp wrote:
To XWiki SAS, and non-affiliated XWiki developers:
While XWiki meets the technical requirements of being "open source,"
so far I have found it to be a bit "closed" in its pragmatic aspects.
The developers actually interacting in public on this list all seem to
be employees of the sponsors, and the communications seem to restrict
themselves to development going on internally. Over the last week or
so, questions coming in from "outsiders" (like myself) go unanswered.
It's not necessarily atypical for open source sponsors to be
unresponsive to outsiders, but the better open source projects still
encourage the active committers to provide some level of support for
potential
contributors.
Beyond that, when outside "hackers" (meant
in a positive sense) are
tinkering with an open source project they typically do offer their
own contributions to questions raised on development mailing lists, in
those open source projects where such activity is possible and/or
encouraged. I see no evidence of outsider developers/hackers in the XWiki
project.
What finally led me to write this e-mail is my inability to build
XWiki from source. I was initially encouraged by the presence of quite
a bit of information about building in the wiki documents. But when I
actually tried to put the instructions into practice I found them to
be less than complete, and unable to be followed to a successful
conclusion (while the purpose of this e-mail is not to get help with
these problems, I will note that most of my problems revolve around
Maven). I have reached the conclusion that the only people really able
to build XWiki are its sponsors, using their own procedures, and these
procedures are _not_ those currently found on the wiki. I hope I am wrong
about
this.
So, are outside developers encouraged to participate? Is any XWiki
development going on outside of the sponsoring organizations? If so,
do those developers find the current building documentation to be
adequate, and I'm simply not up to the task?
--Gary
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