Devlopment organisation

Peter Neubauer peter at neubauer.se
Thu May 19 17:57:27 EDT 2005


Hi Claude,
I'm _very_ impressed by your analytical skills regarding the organisation and 
motivation of projects!
I'm not a good writer, so forgive me of not sorting out everything that 
nicely.
However, when we started this project, at least me had a more pragmatic 
aproach in mind, challanging the more accepted way of doing OSS in Apache 
(meritocracy).

I don't know if you have talked to Niclas on the OPS (Open Participation 
Software) idea, but basically it goes like this:

1. Community aspect
=============
1.1 Goal:
-----------
The goal of OPS is to free not only the use of OSS but even the establishment, 
thus exploring ways of creating a self-organising bazaar in it's true 
meaning.
With sufficient mass, the community will behave like a "flock of birds" - 
there is always someone taking the lead, and any solo - effort in length will 
either provoke the lonely bird to be abandoned (but of course ti can return) 
by the flock or the flock follows.

1.2Rules:
-------------
- we tread the all of the codebase as a self-organising thing, much like a 
Wiki. No patches, only commits. No secret lists. No committer approval by 
anyone.
- No earned merits except current stake and activity in the project
- Everyone is welcome, everything is valuable.

1.3Tools to ensure the process will work
-----------------------------------------------------
-a code ladder with gradually more stable products is established (not by 
commit rights but by convention). everyone is free to commit anywhere but 
there will be a convention on how to stabilise things.
-changes get propagated in the code ladder by gathering a flock of interested 
parties and working it up with testing, docs, review etc.
-a foundation is established that can be the focal point for companies 
whishing to participate, donate or contribute in other ways, much like the 
Eclipse foundation.


2Technical aspect
===========
2.1. Goal
------------
The technical goal of DPML is to provide tools, processes and practices that 
enable the devlopment of truly independent components that can be discovered, 
assembled, configured and (re)deployed without manual intervention if needed, 
thus fully realising the potential of component based software.

2.2Main areas of application (right now)
---------------------------------------------------
-automation
-banking
-web services 

3Commercial aspect
============
2.1.Goal
-----------
DPML wants to provide means for companies to benefit from OSS without the 
risk/need to be directly involved in the highly volatile participation 
process

2.2Means
------------
DPML will try to establish a commercial "web of knowledge" that loosely 
connects individuals and companies that can provide not only services and 
products based on DPML technical platform but even
-provide help to restructure the customers in house development according to 
OSS and DPML principles
-provide help to feed non-core software investments back into OSS (not only 
DPML) for the benefit of the customer (low maintenace/risk, Stallmans 
freedoms) and the OSS community (commercial donations)
-provide professional-grade support on DPML in the lists and via IRC etc. 
(goal is answer time within 30minutes)


=================================================
This is just a very fast write-up, and Niclas/Steve will fill in I guess, but 
that is what at least I want to prove here: new concepts not only in 
technology but even in the community and commercial aspect.
I think we should have written something like this on the site but probably 
never get around to do it :(


These are some goals, but of course this is based on the assumption that we 
can gather a critical "flock of birds" that can exercise these aspects. As it 
is now, with 2 developers doing real work, these principles cannot be seen, 
and I think this is a mojar reason for the current problems.


Wdyt?


/peter



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