23 Jul
2012
23 Jul
'12
11:24 p.m.
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