[Aust-NZ] RE: [OSGeo-Discuss] Open Source development metrics

[Bruce.Bannerman at dpi.vic.gov.au]

IMO:

Thanks Landon and Puneet,


In this case, I tend to agree with Jeroen.

There is a community developing GeoNetwork (and other projects) with 
ongoing work occuring.

This would be occurring concurrently with our development work on a fork.


We would want to be able to take advantage of the new developments that 
others make to the parent project, without having to refactor our 'fork' 
each time, or conversly, the additional work of refactoring our 
customisations, or part there of back to the parent project.


We (the Australian ANZLIC community) have tried this approach already with 
the GeoNetwork ANZLIC Profile, and it is clearly not working (despite 
might I add the outstanding efforts of the main developer).


I think that the only sane approach is to work within the parent project's 
community as peer participants.



I do agree with Puneet that the *ability* to fork a project is critical to 
the success of open source projects, however I think that it should really 
only be used as a last resort if a situation is clearly unsalvagable. 
There is too much dilution of effort otherwise.



Bruce Bannerman 




> Bruce,
> 
> I agree with Puneet. In this scenario it would make more sense for 
> the organization to maintain their own fork of the code to which 
> improvements can be made. This really doesn’t cause problems for the
> parent of the fork as long as there is an established process and 
> some honest effort made to integrate the best of the improvements 
> back into the parent code base.
> 
> This is actually how OpenJUMP works. There are only a handful of 
> developers that actually work on the parent code base. Most of our 
> contributors maintain their own fork, but siphon back improvements 
> to the parent.
> 
> Landon
> 

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