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In March, "1.0 [was] Just Around the Corner" - what's going on now? |
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Yes, OSQA receives active, ongoing effort from DZone. Much of this, however, is focused on meeting the needs of our OSQA professional services customers. The community benefits directly because nearly all the fixes and improvements we produce for customers get rolled into the publicly available, open source codebase. Is OSQA DZone's best Q&A platform solution? Absolutely NOT! It's not even close! Our Qato solution kicks the pants off of OSQA, but you get what you pay for, and OSQA is free. OSQA is more than adequate to meet the needs of the average small site or personal user. If you need a professional system and have more to gain or lose than just the time you spend trying to tinker with some open source Python code, then you would be foolish not to consider Qato seriously. We haven't really concerned ourselves with official releases and version numbers. At some point in the past we might have more, but the code you pull from the OSQA SVN repository is very solid, stable and reliable. 2
If this is the case...why not put the project on GitHub so that it's easier for others in the community to contribute? I think that it could really make a difference. Keep in mind, this is coming from someone currently using OSQA on a new site, that's gaining traction and likely will be using Qato at some point. At least I'd prefer to use Qato over the other commercial options out there that lack the features that Qato/OSQA have.
(06 Nov '11, 12:39)
drewoid
@drewoid, it's really just a legacy fact about how we do things at DZone. We have been using Subversion as our revision control system for several years and have not (yet, at least) decided to migrate to Git. We don't want to have everything BUT OSQA on the core system we use throughout the company. At some point we may migrate internally to Git. At that time we'd be likely to migrate the project to a publicly available Git server, but no guarantees about whether it would be GitHub.
(06 Nov '11, 13:53)
rickross ♦♦
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You guys have every right to do things the way you are doing them, but I think it's too bad for OSQA. Moving the project over to the something like GitHub (or one of the many free open source SVN hosts like assembla.com) could help the project gain contributors that it wouldn't otherwise. I think the feeling of many people is that the project is not particularly open to outside development. I've considered contributing a new skin that's much more flexible to cutomization, but am not sure it would be worth the effort, given the state of the project and it's relationship with Qato. Again, just my two cents...
(06 Nov '11, 14:11)
drewoid
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@drewoid, your points are honestly well-taken. The truth is that OSQA may not be as open as some FOSS projects, but it is still a pretty darned good value for your money! If you don't think it's worth it to contribute, we understand and respect your right to feel that way. Please remember, however, that DZone has donated thousands of man-hours and tons of $$$ to make OSQA a fine, free product. At present, it is simply more expedient for DZone to keep our code in the same VCS we use for the rest of our business. There is merit to the idea that others could potentially contribute more if we had a zillion forks opened on GitHub, but at the same time we fear every last person who modified the code would be turning to us to support their modified versions. This is a future that we should not be eager to step into. It's really not as simple as "more open equals better."
(06 Nov '11, 14:37)
rickross ♦♦
But if I'm right, Qato is built using Java, isn't it? So, you don't use OSQA in your production code, right? Please, tell your plans about supporting OSQA - do you guarantee anything?
(18 Nov '11, 06:17)
dpantele
Qato is 100% Java and shares no code whatsoever with OSQA. I'm unclear what you are asking about guarantees? We guarantee that you can download, use and enjoy this Python/Django Q&A web application we have built and shared with the world. I guess we can also offer to refund the purchase price if you don't like it! :)
(18 Nov '11, 07:42)
rickross ♦♦
I'm asking about developing osqa further. Are you going to develop it? Because it's only Q&A application integrated with django nowadays, which provide in-box solution with good architecture, and I'm afraid that you will stop develop it. And it would be bas for the whole django commnity.
(18 Nov '11, 16:24)
dpantele
@rickross: 'The truth is that OSQA may not be as open as some FOSS projects' what that sentence mean? and what about your intentions about further develop OSQA (by further i mean add features and not just fix bugs) ?
(03 Jan, 17:26)
Hanan
@hanan, it means that OSQA is a product of DZone which we share freely with everyone else. Paid DZone team members enhance and maintain OSQA constantly, but it is a simple, entry-level product compared to our more advanced answer system, Qato. Most feature enhancements in OSQA these days are created for customers, although many of those end up in the FOSS trunk code. Others do not, and are not likely to. We don't pretend OSQA is a democratic project where every free user gets an equal voice and vote. OSQA is a valuable product of a business, and we naturally pay the most attention to the customers who are helping to make the business successful.
(03 Jan, 17:43)
rickross ♦♦
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This is an incredibly important discussion! Let's take stock of where we stand: Let's be careful here. There's nothing stopping anyone from cloning OSQA onto a new forkable github repo, but I think we would all agree we'd like to see work continue together on one project.
(04 Jan, 14:08)
jac
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The usual response is reassurance, but my impression is that they are focusing more of their development time on their commercial product, Qato. It's totally up to them to keep them separate instead of merging the products and providing service/customization/hosting on the commercial side. I might even want to use Qato in the future. It's important to be aware of, though. |
