On Do 15 Jul 2010 22:48:32 CEST Joerg Sawatzki wrote:
Hey,
even though I don't think anybody is violating the terms of the GPL, I'd say X2go is not a true open source project. What you are doing is more like commercial vendors develop software: A few guys develop a product, while the community has no insight at all and from time to time you publish a release and as a free bonus you give a way the sources as well. You could also publish it under some commercial license - it wouldn't matter. It is nice that you use the GPL, that makes it LEGALLY possible to contribute to your product, but technically it is impossible. The community has no effective way to actively take part in the development. Are there any reasons why you don't want others to contribute with their ideas, bug fixes etc.? There are dozens of people outside who want to help you, you are short on time, but somehow it seems you don't want help.
Making a source code repository public is less than 2 minutes work.... If you are not already under version control, you should take 5 minutes and you will never regret it, because it will save you hours later. Give me a shout if you need help with this.
After all, it is of course your very own decision, but from my own open source experience I can only recommend you to do it as soon as possible. Development depends on TWO people - the number of users, bug reports, feature requests will exponentially grow - and the amount of work will grow. Your resources are static - this means, it will take a lot longer until a new feature is implemented or a bug is fixed. As people are impatient, they will start to help themselves, make a fork "X2go Next Generation" and it will be out of your control. So, be smart, honor the community's effort, use it, coordinate, decide about what code to accept and what to refuse, what features to integrate into the core project, publically represent the project and control it's direction.
These are my personal thoughts on this - I wish you that you will find a wise and satisfying way how to go on.
Thanks a lot for the excellent work you have already done!
Jörg
Jörg, thanks for pointing this out. I fully agree with your statement.
Best, Mike
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