Re: [xwiki-devs] Are Outside Developers Really Welcome?

Sergiu, Thank you for the thoughtful, thorough, and reassuring response. I hope to ultimately find myself in the category of a hacker that fell in love with XWiki. I see a lot that interests me, and I see a lot of potential for "useful hacking" and, ultimately, contributing. But I'm much too old to fall into the category of someone eventually hired by XWiki SAS :-) That's not part of my life plan, while XWiki still may be. Before I ask for help in building XWiki next week I'll do my homework and try to truly master Maven (and m2e). --Gary -----Original Message----- From: devs-bounces(a)xwiki.org [mailto:devs-bounces@xwiki.org] On Behalf Of Sergiu Dumitriu Sent: Monday, July 23, 2012 4:27 PM To: XWiki Developers Subject: Re: [xwiki-devs] Are Outside Developers Really Welcome? On 07/23/2012 05:24 PM, Gary Kopp wrote: potential contributors. project. about this. Hi Gary, I'm going to start my answer with an excuse that covers most of the points raised in your mail: for the past week and this one as well, the XWiki SAS company is organizing an annual seminar for all its employees, and everybody is rather busy with all the activities going on here, including a hackaton that changes our priorities into getting a small project done before the end of the week. So this period is not a very good one to judge the interactions in the community. Not all the committers are employees of XWiki SAS. It is true that the largest share of contributions come from XWiki SAS personnel, but not because we're doing closed source development out in the open just to appear open source. The main reason is that whenever we find a talented person sticking around, we usually try to keep that person's interest in the project by employing him (I am such an example). Another reason is that enterprise software communities have different mechanics than user software like browsers or desktop applications. Most of the users are employees of companies using XWiki internally, and they're just trying to get some problems fixed. After their problems are fixed, they go on with their main job. It is hard to get outside users to stick around long enough to get really motivated into staying for the long term. It happens in just two cases: When their company is using XWiki not just as an internal wiki for their company, but as a platform on which they build solutions for their own clients. And we have four such committers. The second case is when they're true hackers that just happened to get in touch with XWiki, and fell in love with it. I am such a person, and Caleb is another. If you check the mailing list activity on the long term, excluding the past week, you will see that we try to answer as many questions as we can, and that the non-committers also respond to questions that they can answer. As for "better open source projects", I for one strongly believe that the XWiki community is one of the best open source communities in the world, although rather on the small to medium size. But since I am an XWiki SAS employee, feel free to doubt my opinion. Now, about the build problem, most of the time it works, but we see from time to time problems raised on the mailing list. Maven is supposed to simplify things and to "just work", but a complex build configuration is more likely to fail than a simple java library. Someone will come in and help you, but don't count on too much interaction from the XWiki SAS employees until the end of the week. I hope that you'll give us a second chance. -- Sergiu Dumitriu http://purl.org/net/sergiu/ _______________________________________________ devs mailing list devs(a)xwiki.org http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs