How do the plans for Qato impact the future of OSQA?

@Simon, you can't have it both ways. You're complaining you don't see much development on OSQA and at the same time saying Qato has too much functionality for your needs because of the addition development on it. You need to understand the scope of both project clearly: OSQA is a general purpose QA that fits most needs by providing a base set of stable functionality. Qato is more of an enterprise level offering providing specific high level features suitable for companies wishing take the QA format further because they need to engage more closely with users and the product to integrate more closely with their existing infrastructure.

@mattdm I, for one, would prefer stability of the existing OSQA feature set over stuffing it full of every suggestion that appears on here. Unless you have a specific problem with the current OSQA, development time is a random metric.

Whereas, I'm sure Askbot is a nice project, you have to ask yourselves what happens when the developers get bored of writing the product freely for mostly ungrateful, non-contributing users. Ultimately, with free/open source, you run the risk that development will stop and you're left with the source code, which you don't want to touch. Worrying that development might stop on OSQA and not on Askbot strikes me as arbitrary. Askbot strikes me as looking like it's driven by a single person. Supposing he doesn't make enough money selling Askbot services and has to get another full-time job, so development on Askbot slows right down? With OSQA there's a clear marketing advantage providing a good stable base platform to get a small % to upgrade to Qato, so there is money in it for DZone to continue to provide a decent product. Selling consulting services around OSQA/Askbot is not a sustainable business, I have experience of selling support around OS products, it does not work.

I did see a comparison posting on Askbot, but all four arguements lack justification.

1. Whether the test cases are a range user installs or test case run by the core team, the issue is range of test cases and it strikes me that OSQA has plenty. I don't see a list of installations for Askbot. Relying on a wide range of user installs creates test cases that the core team just don't think of.
2. The scalability here again is arbitrary, it would be interesting to see the largest installs of both products. Just because a framework has some scalability, doesn't mean that the database isn't the bottleneck at large scales and so ultimately the DB architecture decides the speed, for example. Again, no hard facts.
3. OSQA has an upgrade script that deals with upgrades, always worked for me.
4. This may well be the case, but what are the numbers? Is Askbot 0.5% faster for full page load? With memcache turned on I find OSQA extremely fast, was the test performed using memcache enabled on both (which I'd say should be the default setup for any install of both)? With memcache turned on, is there really much scope for speed improvements when the cache hits?

People tend to worry about things outside of their control, but if your QA site is critical, you need to either get a commercial implementation, learn the internals of an OS product very well, or get someone you pay to learn them. OSQA and Askbot are not distinct in this regard.

btw, I have no affiliation with DZone, but the differentiation is very clear to me. Probably the only mistake DZone are making to not to describe the scope of each product using catchy marketing language, i.e. "OSQA - stable, QA, mainstream, accessible, familiar" , "Qato - enterprise, supported, social, CRM, integration". People need to understand what OSQA does well, and what it doesn't do and make an informed decision based on that.

Sorry for the long post, but there's a general lack of dealing in hard facts in this discussion. This all looks like "OMG, they have more checkins than you!" to me and lacks any reasoned and detailed analysis. I'm only posting because the doom and gloomers seem like to throw out unfounded comments rather more than happy users. Our forum users are very happy with the OSQA functionality, UI, stability and usability. Once I got everything switched on and speeded up, I've never had a single complaint. That means I'm sticking with it and couldn't care less what the SVN checkin rate is.

@mattdm, we should take this offline. This is not the time or place for the discussion, and there's no reason to panic. Things will only get better.

OSQA is alive and well, and OSQA will continue to enjoy the support and resources of DZone. I really don't think you need to worry at all if you just want to continue to use our FOSS offering. Some of our coolest ideas, however, will emerge in our commercial product. Qato.

DZone is a business - it's simple. We'd love to do business with you, and if Askbot is superior for your use case, then we fully understand.

PS - I should add that DZone's investment in Q&A technology is increasing, and OSQA has actually hired new, dedicated full-time team resources specifically as a result of our combined work on both products. OSQA is here to stay, and it will be supported by DZone for a long time to come.