24 Jul
2012
24 Jul
'12
12:27 a.m.
On 07/23/2012 05:24 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
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/