--- In IBDI@egroups.com, Ann Harrison <harrison@n...> wrote:

> At 11:55 PM 7/31/2000 +1000, David J N Begley wrote:
> > One only needs to look at
> > some other successful OSS projects (ignore Linux) to see that this
> > is true.
>
> I agree completely about the importance of the community and have
> spent
> much of the past seven months encouraging the growth of our
> community.
> In most successful open source projects, including apache, there has
> been
> a core of knowledgeable developers who helped others refine their
> patches
> and develop an understanding of the bones beneath the flesh of the
> code.
> So it should be for InterBase. Since InterBase is being delivered to
> the
> open source community with 15 years of commercial history, there is
> benefit
> to including people from that group in the initial "inner circle."
>
> The inner circle should not be closed - as others develop a
> reputation
> for creating patches that improve InterBase, they will join the
> circle.
>
> I'm looking for a way that people from the original group can serve
> as mentors - not just on an "as available" basis, but consistently,
> especially in the beginning. The InterBase "engine" is a complex
> little beastie and doesn't take kindly to abuse. Being an old hand,
> I consider some of what has been done in the Borland years to be
> abuse and would like to see it undone. Perhaps someone without my
> background (or Charlie's or Deej's or Dave's or Jim's) could sort
> the wheat from the chaff ... but the help of some of the people
> above
> would increase the chance of success. And, like all of you, they
> (we) must pay our bills somehow.
>
> >(2) if the NewBase project is going to operate differently to other
> > OSS
> > projects then this should be made clear to any potential new
> > users/developers - if you just say, "This is an open source
> > project" with
> > no further explanation then obviously users/developers from
> > other OSS
> > projects will come with certain expectations.
>
> When I thought that the company formerly known as ISC would be
> responsible for the original release of the open source code,
> it had been my expectation that we would define and publish the
> protocol we were following. I also expected that we would start
> with the funding necessary to pay our experts as we built the
> peripheral businesses.

On this subject, the project that may have the most relevance to this
discussion may be Zope. It was an existing commercial product, that
had an existing userbase and developer community when Digital
Creations made the decision (under the urging of their VC) to open
source it. Since then they have been seeing their user base expand
dramatically, as well as their developer community. They have been
grappling with the management of this growth for a while now and have
recently formalized an approach called 'the fishbowl process'. You can
read about it here: http://dev.zope.org/Fishbowl/

You might also consider contacting Paul Everitt of Digital Creations
to get his thoughts on the challenges of this approach to software
development.

Michael Bernstein.