Thomas,
That's why I added in 'user' to the community. If there is an active
communication medium with one or two developers communicating with the
user community than there is health there. So I always say to look at
the developer & user community to make sure it's active as one of the
gauges of the health of an open source product.
Nicole
On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 8:40 AM, Thomas Krichel <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Brett Bonfield writes
>
>> I think Jonathan and Nicole nailed it with community health,
>
> I beg to differ.
>
> If you requiree a healthy community to start working with a piece of
> software, how do you want a grassroots project to start? Obviously a
> small project will start with one or two developers, and it won't
> grow, until a few people work with it despite the fact that it's a
> small thing to start with.
>
> Requiring an upfront healthy community is particurly problematic is
> a small community such as digital library work.
>
> On the other kind, there is widely adopted software that I got
> cajoled into maintaining, that consider bad. Apache is one of
> them. I run maybe 50 virtual servers an a bunch of boxes, I am still
> puzzled how it works and it's trial and error with each software
> upgrade, where goes that NameVirtualServer thing into, the constant
> croaks "server foo has no virtualserver". I'm not a dunce, but
> Apache makes me feel I am one. When I look at these config files
> that are half-baked XML, I wonder what weed the guy smoked who
> invented this.
>
> If I could do it allover again, I would do it in lighttpd. Oh well
> it was not there in 1995 where I started running web servers.
>
> Other problematic case: Mailman. I run about 130 mailing lists, over
> 80 have a non-standard config, I am running every few months into
> problems with onne of them, despite the fact that I wrote a script
> to configure all the non-standard lists the same way.
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel
> http://authorclaim.org/profile/pkr1
> skype: thomaskrichel
>
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