[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XT, OpenSource and altruistic effort
Peter Murray-Rust wrote: > I have discoursed at some length because I think there is a real issue here > for XML-DEV. It is clear that high-quality OpenSource projects require a > virtual collaborative group - what is the best way of promoting this? > So what helps an OpenSource project make it? Actually, I wonder if it is true that high-quality projects require collaborative programming. I would say quite the reverse: we need to be able to reduce collaboration interdependencies to a minium: we need to have technologies layered enough that a motivated and talented individual programmer can finish off a layer in less than a month or two (full-time). In other words, what I am learning with Schematron is that the initiator of a project has to provide adequate proof-of-concept and implementation and infrastructure, which can be used as a base so that others can submit enhancements. If the kinds of enhancements expected can be distilled into general interfaces, then the collaboration is one of collaborative publishing (e.g. CNET for perl) rather than of collaborative programming per se. If we have a look at the larger, collaborative projects, it seems that they benefit from large sponsors (e.g. Apache, Mozilla); having two programmers on a payroll is a good way to promote collaborative programming. Otherwise, most programmers will try to solve specific problems only. I think the bite-sized chunking aspect is very important. When a software package gets to a certain size, then bug fixes and non-extension enhancements represent quite a workload on the original developer. I think Dave Ragget's tidy passed that stage sometime last year, and perhaps James feels the same about XT. (It is also important to note, for the people who complain that W3C specs are inferior to IETF specs because IETF requires working implementations, that most W3C specs have (99%) working implementations available before going to Recommendation: look at XML, XSLT, etc. It seems that XML Schemas will definitely follow this: that is what Candidate Recommendation period is for.) One area where Open Source projects have been week has been internationalization. Sometimes it seems that Open Source has been a disaster for i18n. Part of this has been that LINUX and the standard C libraries have been so poor, but part of it is because adding reasonable internationalization has tended to move a project beyond the scope of a single programmer's effort. If we look at Emacs, it is really good for providing a package mechanism to let the single man-month programmer or weekend hacker build a tool. But it has taken years for the MULE (MULtilingual Extensions) version of Emacs to get grafted into the mainstream release. Fortunately, things have changed rapidly: the two biggest technological contributions, I would say, are Java and C++'s IBM's International Classes for Unicode. If anyone is approaching a C++ Open Source project, I would strongly recommend they start by adopting the ICU International Classes. The URL is http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/ (If you need more info on Unicode, Tony Graham's book is excellent.) Rick Jelliffe *************************************************************************** This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers. To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@x...&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ ***************************************************************************
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