Re: [Kamailio-Users] [Kamailio-Devel] 1.4.0 release plans, project matters

I would strongly concur with Darren here on all counts. I don't, of course, have any sort of inside perspective as I am not involved in development, so I can't presume to judge the merits or veracity of the various justifications given for this adventure. Apart from Bogdan-Andrei's brief treatment of the subject, explanations haven't been particularly forthcoming to the community; this seems to be a back-room affair that is still playing out. There are, certainly, times in the life of an open-source project where a code fork may be justifiable; irreconcilable differences over development methodologies, project management practices, and overall design philosophy and direction/roadmap may figure into these. Also, what Bogdan-Andrei has put forth concerning his freedom to pursue this undertaking in light of prevailing and officially codified open-source precepts is factually valid and logically ostensible. Now, that having been said, from the perspective of a user contemplating the adoption of OpenSER in a serious industrial application, or worse, a businessperson who has sunk substantial investment into deployment of OpenSER, this is really, really bad. Much of the value of open-source projects comes from the fact that despite the range of political characteristics potentially colouring the development and its management (from profoundly hierarchical, as in the case of the Linux kernel, to rather loose coupled and organic, as seems to be the case with OpenSER), comes from certain rational expectations that one holds regarding their security, stability, consistency and continuity. Industry is just as afraid of "fly-by-night" open source packages as it is of fly-by-night vendors that may not be around tomorrow. Generally, when one chooses to invest in a rather serious and evolving open-source solution like OpenSER, one expects the following things: 1. The project will be around next year, more or less in its present state. 2. Its development is coloured by a relatively consistent methodology; even if the original core developers no longer contribute heavily to the code base itself, their oversight, direction, vision, method and quality-control is realised in the activities of those to which that work has been delegated. The sources of that direction and influence must be relatively cohesive and clearly identifiable. 3. In the case of something relatively low-level and niche like OpenSER, a thriving ecosystem of first and third-party contributors and vendors of commercial support must exist. Nobody is going to trail-blaze without any sense of reliance on anybody in particular. This heavily depends on #2, and on the consistency of the project as a unitary thing. 4. The project will retain a unitary character as much as possible; there will not be bewildering an array of species and subspecies of the code which will contain varying degrees of features, quality control, bug fixes, and developer and organisational affinities. All such choices involve trade-offs that are unacceptable in serious work, especially when the trade-offs involve some form of playing roulette, gambling on the meritocratic superiority and pre-eminence of a particular version and not another and its longevity. ... This type of code work heavily upsets these expectations and decreases overall confidence in the project, which, especially in open-source, is so profoundly a function of the people behind it and the ecosystem it cultivates. How do I know whether the latest bleeding-edge modules that perform low-level technical enhancements or fixups won't be in OpenSIPS, but ones which offer more high-level integration paths and business logic interworking in Kamailio? What kind of compatibility can I count on if I wish to switch? How do I know that critical bugs applicable to pre-fork code in Kamailio will be fixed in OpenSIPS, or vice versa? At the encouragement of Juha Heinenen, I just submitted a bug report about a race condition on call branching to the Kamailio Tracker. How do I know whether it's going to be addressed sooner in Kamailio or in OpenSIPS, if at all? What if this type of issue is closer to Bogdan-Andrei's core competency and interest than that of the remaining Kamailio developers, or vice versa? Now I have to engage in this type of guesswork and detect the political winds. I shouldn't have to do this as a user; I was counting on one development team and one mission. How do I know there won't be more code forks or internecine feuds? If I am a medium to large organisation with relatively high internal technical capital, I may see an economic rationale in taking an existing release and all maintenance of it in-house and *not* releasing the changes back to the community (after all, too many "communities" to choose from, if nothing else). Or I may release it as my own code fork later, once it's deviated enough. Both of these damage and undermine the incipient ecosystem surrounding OpenSER. Code works beget more code forks and more proprietary approaches by shifting the mindset of users to a self-reliant approach as a matter of pragmatic necessity; if I can't really count on the project's integrity politically, there's far less incentive to build business decisions around it. Open-source contributors are also going to be less enthused about contributing to a landscape full of code branches, as they have to make similar bets about their relative merits and significance. As far as I can tell, OpenSER has a handful of core developers and one to two dozen ancillary developers. This isn't that big of a project from an organisational perspective. Somehow, open-source projects much bigger - with much more at stake - have managed to survive without this type of feuding and forking. MySQL, the Linux kernel, Apache, and even Asterisk to a relatively high degree, are all examples of projects with hundreds to thousands of active contributors that do not seem to suffer from these types of problems, which is why I consider them relatively safe to invest in. Once again, I am not berating either side of this issue; I don't have the perspective to judge. Likewise, I stand in awe and appreciation of Bogdan-Andrei's significant technical contributions to OpenSER and the offerings Voice System is poised to make, and can appreciate the possible legitimate reasons he may have for wanting to make this split. But I think that I speak on behalf of the prevailing majority of users, adopters, enthusiasts of and contributors to OpenSER when I implore you guys to work your differences out, compromise, standardise, and merge the code back into one project so that we can all continue to enjoy, evolve and innovate with the best, most extensible, polymorphic and featureful SIP server out there. Cheers, -- Alex Darren Sessions wrote: -- Alex Balashov Evariste Systems Web : http://www.evaristesys.com/ Tel : (+1) (678) 954-0670 Direct : (+1) (678) 954-0671 Mobile : (+1) (706) 338-8599 _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel(a)lists.kamailio.org http://lists.kamailio.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devel