[Xitami] ProtoNova v1.0 Released! (And a XiFusion note)

[TW]

Pieter,

first of all let me express my deep respect and congratulations on a very 
good thingy you created.

Following let me point out the view of someone used to participate in 
collaborative development efforts where possible (where 'someone' is able 
to :-) ). This is meant to be a constructive contribution to the discussion 
even if words sometimes might sound very direct.

>Why not put Xitami on SourceForge?  This is a matter of judgement: in
>the many years that Xitami has been out in the wild, we have had a
>few contributions (such as Thomas J. Hruska's Xifusion, and LRWP), a
>fair number of bug fixes and code patches, and an incredible number
>of feature requests and bug reports.  But we have not seen anyone
>pick up the source code and propose useful improvements to its core
>design or basic functionality.

In my opinion this is simply due to the somewhat unclear status of the 
special license under which xitami is distributed and the kind of weak 
position of imatix to xitami (verbatim as one 'can' understand it from the 
xitami homepage 'well it's opensource, but we're not quite sure, GPL or 
not, we'll further improve it or we won't ....).
So, some enthusiastic coder oder system designer considering working with 
the code, trying to improve or enhance this and that feature might come 
think that it it's way unclear what happens to his work if it's being 
submitted to the xitami crew or imatix. Will there be anyone to review it? 
Will it be reviewed in some faire amount of time? Is there any transparency 
as to what happens to a contribution? Will it be incorporated into the 
freeware version or into the pro version only (given its useful of course) ?
Last but not least, as can be seen on sourceforge for example, personal 
vanity of indivdual developers seems to play a role. Possibly people use it 
in their resumes, don't know. But such people should be encouraged by 
giving them credits (e.g. until recently I didn't know that LRWP for xitami 
was developped by a third party, namely Robin Dunn, whom I din't find to be 
acknowledged anywhere)

>One possible reason is that Xitami
>uses a complex toolset: Libero, SFL, SMT, WSX,... the server is not
>something that you open up and say 'ah, I understand'.  Conclusion: I
>do not believe it would work well as a collaborative open source
>project.

Well, complexity is quiet a relativ notion. Just want to name the Jakarta 
project. I think out there is great big bunch of talented people being able 
and willing to cope with complex developments.

>Some people have suggested, and I think this is a great idea, to
>simply upload the Xitami source code to SourceForge, and start a true
>collaborative development.  iMatix would give their blessing to such
>a project, though we would ask that such a project use a different
>name.  We would make one suggestion, though: to use the GPL instead
>of the current license.  We also plan to do this with future releases
>of our source code.

Putting xitami on sourceforge and collaboratively develop it further would 
be a nice idea at first sight.
But i suspect just putting the code there and voilá wouldn't lead anywhere.
Even the open source community needs some kind of marketing and some kind 
of directives, namely
1) a leading authority driving and coordinating efforts - in the case of 
xitami  I can't think of anyone else but someone from the xitami team even 
if the os project runs under a different name
2) a vision (expressed as some slogan ...small 
footprint...performance....usability)
3) a differentiation to similar such efforts

surely no one can ask you people at imatix to take such a responsibility in 
an open source project like that but I personally would be very glad for 
you to be renowned as the ones being responsible for the development of the 
best-of-breed xxx-webserver and of course make profit of your name and 
service offers around the product (though not of the product itself).

Well, I wish xitami and their founders have a long and prosper future which 
way ever.

Tony