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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Yeh, but, just imagine that had there
not been this prior exchange on this mailing list there would not
have been at least some glimpse of some people's expectation of
the end product. As for evaluation, not sure if your assertion
would work in a "real world" environment with a fortune 500
company. I couldn't imagine a project manager telling his superior
that she/he only looked at the top 3-5 picks and went with one of
them ... ??? To make a good solid judgement call, you should take
a close look at what is out there and then short list, ahem, with
a committee of trusted contributors/stakeholders ... otherwise,
autocracy will most likely not get you far with collaborators.
Sure, somewhere, a decision must be made, but you have to listen
to the voices you are hoping to invite on-board. <br>
<br>
Closed source contribution to open source is normally made up of
human connections to the devs/project managers. All it takes is a
couple of emails and the answer will be pretty straight forward
... yes-no. Have a look/try the software first, does not take long
to do this, and then ask the devs who had a record of being
supportive of the open source community. I can approach the Quasar
devs if this makes a difference. At least it would either
introduce another solid codebase to start from if they agreed to
collaborate/cooperate. Perhaps even having to audit the code would
be a deal breaker, who knows.<br>
<br>
Yup comments can be cheap, or we could ignore those we don't agree
with and then end up with a silent mailing list. If you want to
build community, you have to promote community involvement. The
project will need testers/QA for alpha/betas and not just dev
work; same with a docs team.<br>
<br>
I imagine that perhaps a few possible choices could be summed up,
with a dev doing a cursory look at the code to see if it is clean
enough to work with. It would be shame to go with an initial
codebase that already needed major cleanup.<br>
<br>
Cheers,<br>
<br>
Marc<br>
<br>
Le 2013-08-28 21:09, Donald A. Lobo a écrit :<br>
</div>
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<div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size:
15.555556297302246px; font-family: arial, helvetica,
sans-serif; background-color: transparent; font-style:
normal;">my 2 cents and some advice based on past experience
with civicrm and other products:</div>
<div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size:
15.555556297302246px; font-family: arial, helvetica,
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<div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size:
15.555556297302246px; font-family: arial, helvetica,
sans-serif; background-color: transparent; font-style:
normal;">a. Avoid going down the route of design by committee
/ design by mailing list. Things get talked about a lot with
little forward progress</div>
<div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size:
15.555556297302246px; font-family: arial, helvetica,
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normal;"><br>
</div>
<div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size:
15.555556297302246px; font-family: arial, helvetica,
sans-serif; background-color: transparent; font-style:
normal;">b. Based on some of your prior emails, i'm assuming
there are quite a few open source packages out there. I dont
think the project should attempt to evaluate all of them. Pick
the top three to five based on some metrics, your past
experience, their current track record, community etc and go
with it. The project does not have enough time / money to
spend all of it on evaluation.</div>
<div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size:
15.555556297302246px; font-family: arial, helvetica,
sans-serif; background-color: transparent; font-style:
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<div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size:
15.555556297302246px; font-family: arial, helvetica,
sans-serif; background-color: transparent; font-style:
normal;">c. Since you (and some other orgs) are already fairly
happy with ledger-cli, i'm not sure how important and how much
time u'll should spend on the evaluation phase</div>
<div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size:
15.555556297302246px; font-family: arial, helvetica,
sans-serif; background-color: transparent; font-style:
normal;"><br>
</div>
<div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size:
15.555556297302246px; font-family: arial, helvetica,
sans-serif; background-color: transparent; font-style:
normal;">d. In our past experience, trying to convince folks
who have a closed source system / have chosen not to open
source their code has been a big time sink</div>
<div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size:
15.555556297302246px; font-family: arial, helvetica,
sans-serif; background-color: transparent; font-style:
normal;"><br>
</div>
<div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size:
15.555556297302246px; font-family: arial, helvetica,
sans-serif; background-color: transparent; font-style:
normal;">e. Your most important audience are other foundations
who want to use the end product and folks who are investing a
fair bit of time on the work. Its great to get comments and
feedback from the broader community, but take that with a
grain of salt (since commenting is relatively cheap). In the
civi world, we have lots of folks who want us to do lots of
things. Most of the times, these things are not as important
when those folks are asked to contribute / sponsor / do the
work.</div>
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<div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size:
15.555556297302246px; font-family: arial, helvetica,
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normal;">lobo</div>
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<div class="y_msg_container">>> Perhaps so --
although, is there any reason to believe their code
base<br>
>> is miles above the many other codebases out
there of this type? I'm<br>
>> reluctant to burn time trying to get a
codebase liberated that isn't<br>
>> uniquely suited.<br>
> Yeah, we already tried that once, which is why
this accounting software<br>
> wasn't written 3 years ago ...<br>
><br>
> (for those not in the know, I was working on a
funded project to do this<br>
> software in 2009, but our main funder got
sidetracked by the goal of<br>
> "liberating" some proprietary NPO accounting
software, and I had to move<br>
> on to other things)<br>
><br>
From what I have seen and experience in my particular
case, I could not <br>
imagine any NPO accounting software owner would be
willing to part with <br>
proprietary code. Fund accounting looks like quite a
lucrative industry <br>
that is really driven by software and very little by
service. The <br>
approach of going with some already open sourced code
from a solid <br>
accounting package, to me, would seem to be the more
common sense <br>
approach. I can only see a lot of "push-back" from the
fund accounting <br>
proprietary owners at the prospect of having a new
player on the block <br>
with an open sourced fund accounting package.<br>
<br>
If you were working on the project, what happened to
the code? or were <br>
you just at the planning stage without any starter
code?<br>
<br>
Cheers,<br>
<br>
Marc<br>
<br>
-- <br>
Marc Paré<br>
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<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
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