Everyone is free to create a fork. But it seems you want to shut the project down here and start in a completely new place. Don’t think you will be able to convince folks to do this. Yes, this is the common problem with all projects here, there are no active (“full time”) developers/maintainers here. Every volunteer has its own life/job and sometimes they get very busy and disappear for a long time. I’m not sure that moving project to a new place will attract more developers. There are currently at least 2 fairly active devs (Henning Staib and Robin Collier, who are doing some fixes in the code.
A project doesn’t need any full-time developers to be successful. Lots of projects work well without FT people. Sure sometimes they fall behind and have problems, but that’s life. What I see here is no release since 2008, tons of unanswered questions on the forum about jingle, little to no documentation for jingle, etc, make a big chunk of truly awesomely increadable technology very hard to use. I mean, look how insanely cool it would be if this was given a little TLC: people could setup AV chats with just a few lines of code! as it is, lots us can’t figure it out. It is, for all intents and purposes, non-functional.
Sometimes problems like this require creating a more open development environment where new people can come in, get excited about the potential and get to work. But it has to be easy for them to get in or they’ll never start.
What exactly are you referring to as a barrier? Do you mean that forum registration form is asking to much info? I know that there are lots of fields, but i thought that only few of them are mandatory.
They were all mandatory when I signed up about a month ago. I’ve never seen that kind of barrier for joining an open source community and market researchers will tell you it really does put people off and stop them from joining.
I’m sorry for your account being locked. Contacting Jive about this is not an option as they have abandoned this site and projects (except for hosting it and doing backend software maintaining). I wil ltry to talk to admins to create some email address for such issues, so locked user could contact administrators of the site.
I think that’s necessary. If Jive has abandoned this site, it’s misleading for their logo and link to be everywhere. Maybe they are still paying some bills, but there needs to be some way to contact an admin or something.
You are referring to google code, svn. Personally i don’t like Google’s bug tracking system. This site also has SVN, Jira for bug tracking, Fisheye for svn changes tracking, Crucible, Bamboo for automated builds.
That’s all well and good, but one of the advantages of something like google code is that you can actually figure out where everything is. It’s kinda hard for a noob to even find the smack issue tracker, so if it’s better that’s great, but maybe it doesn’t matter. Sometimes too much is a bad thing.
If you want to become a contributor, you will have to sign an agreement and your first patches would have to be reviewed by current developers. I can give more information about that, but i can’t guarantee that this will be a fast procedure.
I would be happy to consider this, but, honestly I see it as another barrier. I think it’s good to require patches to be reviewed first – most open source projects work more or less like that. But if there’s no one who’s an active maintainer to do such reviews, on an ongoing basis, you are kind of in trouble.
In my particular case, I would be offering one-time contributions, so patches probably make sense anyway (or else I would work in a branch, and the “patch” would be a diff between the branches when I am done). If you want to start me down the path of becoming a contributor, I am happy to do that if maybe it will speed things up down the road. Although please don’t bother if we are stuck with a CVS repo.
bjorn
WEB-16,