THIS IS A TEST INSTANCE. ALL YOUR CHANGES WILL BE LOST!!!!
Report for Dec 2008 for OFBiz (Open For Business) as a top level project.
The Apache Open For Business Project (Apache OFBiz) is an open source
enterprise automation software project. By enterprise automation we mean:
ERP, CRM, E-Business / E-Commerce, MRP, SCM, CMMS/EAM, and so on.
We have no issues that require Board assistance at this time. Some feedback from the board on the infrastructure issues would be helpful.
Community:
- One new PMC member has been added: Bilgin Ibryam (2008-10-18).
- No new committers have been added.
- The OFBiz Symposium at ApacheCon US 2008 was a great success. There was significant community involvement in presentation and attendance, and a lot of building relationships with others in the ASF. There was also a lot of discussion about the project as well, including future strategy and direction, getting more involvement from the large numbers of people working with OFBiz on a regular basis but not really contributing a lot (and why it is in their best interest to contribute and get more involved, ie how they could solve some issues they have been facing by going it alone), and in general how different people/groups with different objectives can work together to achieve goals (like continuing to allow contributions without test cases, but encourage everyone who wants something to work or continue to work a certain to contribute test cases to the already fairly large test library).
Project:
- Lots of new functionality in both business applications and framework
- New effort to gather requirements and designs to drive and organize the next generation of enhancements
- New objective, mostly just discussion so far, to move toward using OFBiz to manage the project, and perhaps eventually more of the ASF
Infrastructure:
It has been brought up as a concern that OFBiz is not using available ASF infrastructure for various things. Thanks especially to Ted Husted of the PRC for feedback on this.
There are three resources linked to from the OFBiz home page that are not on ASF infrastructure:
1. doc site @ docs.ofbiz.org
2. nightly builds @ build.hotwaxmedia.com
3. demo site @ demo.hotwaxmedia.com
Aside from these, as you've noted, the ofbiz.org domain name is still registered to me personally.
I'll comment on each of these, but in short none of these has come up as urgent issues (as I imagine you have guessed) so while they have been discussed from time to time, relatively minor problems run into while working on them have stalled progress.
docs.ofbiz.org
This site has been around since before the ASF incubation. Around that time cwiki was just coming into use, so we looked at moving stuff over briefly but it was not a priority for incubation and was tabled. We actually started working on this again a few months ago (Jacopo Cappellato and I were working on it) but ran into an issue because even thought the confluence instance on docs.ofbiz.org is quite old (we haven't updated it for a long time), the one on cwiki.apache.org is even older. At that point fearing a large manual effort, and there being other priorities, we decided to table it again (hoping that infra would be updating confluence soon, but no we haven't asked anyone about it; again, it's been considered a lower priority).
build.hotwaxmedia.com
This is a pretty new thing, and was more community-driven than PMC-driven. In other words, it was setup and then presented to the PMC and we assisted in linking to it and tried to make sure it was clear that it is not an official or ASF hosted resource. If I remember right in this case someone setup a manual build server on a home computer on a DSL line or something, and then Tim Ruppert at Hotwax (one of my partners) saw the dev list messages and volunteered to do something more formal, or more accurately volunteered to have the people at Contegix do it on one of our boxes hosted there (in general with them we describe what we want done and they take care of all installation, scripting, monitoring, etc).
So far we don't have any volunteers on the OFBiz PMC do work with infra to get this setup, but we could certainly give it a try.
demo.hotwaxmedia.com
This has been around a bit longer than build.hotwaxmedia.com, but has a similar history. No official demo site exists for OFBiz, so this community contributed one is the one linked to on the site. There are also some others (or maybe just one other) listed on a confluence page, and if I remember right those were also things like personal desktops running an instance of OFBiz.
Again this was volunteer driven by people outside of the PMC and simply linked to as a resource that might be helpful to the community. We also asked them to make it clear who the demo was hosted and sponsored by so that people would not think it was an official ASF resource. It concerns me that you found things that made it appear to be an official ASF resource... could you be more specific about what led you to believe that and how we might clarify (which can probably be done a lot more quickly and easily than setting up a replacement).
ofbiz.org domain
This was not a high priority during incubation, and I understood that in general it wasn't a big deal as the official URL for Apache OFBiz is now ofbiz.apache.org. I'd be happy to donate the domain name, I just haven't been asked to yet, and while I've thought about doing so it also hasn't been a priority. The biggest part of the effort would be finding and trying to change references to old ofbiz.org email addresses (I think Andrew Zeneski and I were the only ones to ever use those). For me personally I wouldn't mind... most of the emails I get on that address are things that should really go to the project mailing lists, and 99% of the time I reply with a "form letter" type email that asks them to subscribe and discuss it there with the community instead of with me personally.
Possible Resolutions
1. Move all of these resources to current ASF infrastructure
2. These resources are hosted at Contegix. Matthew Porter at Contegix has mentioned to us that they are doing some hosting for Maven repositories that is somehow official ASF infra, but I don't really know what that means or if it is helpful. Matthew is currently looking into the details so we have some ideas, and feedback from infra would be helpful as well (though we have not requested that yet).