[Z3lab] Re: [Zope3-dev] Re: [Zope3 / ECM] : Project launched !

[Martijn Faassen]

Dario Lopez-Kästen wrote:
> 
> Can someone please explain tome the rationale concerning the 
> near-anymosity and suspicion this endeavour arises?
> 
> Is it all about NotInventedHere(tm) or are there deeper issues behind 
> this? Perhaps economical reasons?
> 
> I must say that I am very surprised by the amount of time and energy 
> spent on discussing this...

I have some theories. I think for a project of this magnitude with so 
many vested interests in the Zope world, you see people being more vocal 
than for a smaller open source project. I am not sure how one could've 
expected otherwise -- we saw the same, especially in the beginning, for 
Zope 3. I think however that the issue of a perceived-to-be neutral 
playing field is important for most open source projects, great or small.

Infrae has tried to start quite a few community-driven projects in the 
past. We've often tried hosting them infrae.com (web, cvs, mailing list, 
etc). So far we've seen two scenarios:

*  Sometimes nobody takes up on them at all.

* For some projects, such as Formulator (which has a very long history)
   and Silva we get some contributions, quite a few quite valuable, but
   the community remains quite Infrae centered.

More recently, for a few projects we were involved in starting, such as 
Kupu and Five, we hosted them on codespeak instead. Those turned into 
vibrant communities with many parties involved.

Of course, not all of the stuff we hosted on codespeak.net took off like 
that (yet :). In addition, the nature of the project goals and codebase 
itself strongly influences whether a community will form or not. But, 
while many other factors are in play, I do believe that if the playing 
field for Five or Kupu had not seemed equal (if we'd hosted them at 
infrae.com and presented them as Infrae projects), they wouldn't be the 
community driven open source projects they are today.

So, I suspect that when encountering a project, many people let their 
decision to contribute be based on first impressions that have to do 
with openness and neutrality, beyond just the presence of an open source 
license. If it's all run by Infrae, let's just wait for Infrae. It's 
harder to make an impact by contributing, and Infrae may decide 
otherwise anyway. If it's run by a community, it feels more open, and it 
depends more on the individuals involved to make it go forward.

Right now you see people speak up as more is at stake than usual, but I 
think this process of evaluation is in fact always taking place at some 
level, for many people.

Regards,

Martijn