Jóhann B. Guðmundsson <johannbg(a)gmail.com> writes:
On 1/4/19 9:27 AM, Jaromir Talir wrote:
Hi Jóhann,
it's great to hear that ISNIC is evaluating FRED. Feel free to report
any obstacles, we will do our best to make it right tool for you :)
I'm in no doubt you would but this and reference to ( internal
tracker? ) issues in commit's on github begs the question how much (
if any ) registry ( or the 3r's ) community product fred is and
perhaps every open sourced project coming from the cz.nic development
department?
To further explain what I'm getting at is that the general association
is made when hearing or reading the term ‘open source’ is that the
software project is collaboratively developed and shared freely with
whoever wants to see it (some licenses prohibit commercial use or
abstraction, but in general anybody who wants to can look at the code
and modify it for their private non-commercial use).
It's an world where anyone can join the developer community and submit
code and patches and other resources, and contribute to the roadmap of
that project. Sometimes the new joiner may not have commit access
until their credentials are proven, but the project is generally
community based and community driven.
In the case of Fred that community would most likely be made up of the
registry, registrar and registrant, the target audience of such
application or application stack )
The there is the "unenlightened" association in which projects
commonly generated by universities,institutions, corporate and other
entities in which they freely share their source code, but they
provide no community mechanisms for contributing to it or helping
guide its direction.
Sure individuals can email in a patch or suggestion, make pull request
in git(hub) and hope that it gets applied but there is no guarantee
this will happen.
Nobody in here will doubt that "enlightened" shared maintainership is
ideal. But in the real world it has its cost and unless you can get a
sufficient number of contributors there is a very little reason to even
try. People are unlikely to contribute to a project they are not
themselves using. If you maintain and develop something like a
compiler, standard library, library for parsing some common format or a
picture viewer it will have thousands or even millions of users. And in
that case it is easy to attract sufficient number of contributors so it
starts to make sense to have an upstream governed by some steering
committee recruited from all main stakeholders. But FRED right now is
not that type of software. So far it is used in 12 countries, mostly by
sysadmins who have hard time writing C++ or contributing with some
regularity. It doesn't mean that we won't accept a patch. It also
doesn't mean that it cannot grow into that area if there's enough
interest. But, so far, it is an "undiscovered country" for I think very
obvious reasons.
The only way to get their voice(s) heard is to either know the right
people within the developer team, or to establish a formal
collaboration between universities,institutions, corporate and other
entities so that they can co-develop the project together.
Basically the open sourcing of the project is done in the strictest
literal sense of the word, in that the source code is open for anyone
to see but no more no less which more then often than not leads to
fork offs..
Of the above, which one does Fred fall under?
<snip>
.....
</snip>
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