SMF community under siege
My first blog here so I wanted to give you all a big thumbs up for all your positive efforts for the Joomla community. I think that thanks to your effort Joomla has been a more positive community and that open source matters has been trying very hard to be transparent and engage the joomla users. You can have a look at the SMF community to see how good we have it with Joomla.
An example of how not to manage a community can be found at SMF (a free forum software). SMF differs from Joomla in that a commercial company owns the SMF software and that no code changes are allowed by others unless the SMF manager approves this. Joomla on the other hand is GPL software that allows modification by anyone without explicit permission. This was requiring JFusion to make lost of work-arounds to ensure the SMF license was respected (the previous official SMF-Joomla bridge was withdrawn because of license issues).
There has been a recent public fall-out between the SMF owner and SMF team members / developers. A letter from 30 SMF developers / team mebers (both current and former) asked the the manager of SMF to stand down and allow for a not-for-profit organisation to be created for SMF. You can read the blog post by one of the original SMF developers
http://www.lewisonline.ca/?p=426
The SMF manager that was appointed by original SMF developers, refused to step down and create a not-for-profit organisation. Instead she banned the team members that spoke up and refused to sign a new team agreement not to speak up publicity about the issue.
http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=362862.msg2...
The sad thing is that the original developers of SMF are not even allowed to make changes to the code or fork the project, as the code is "owned" by the commercial company. There has been some displeasure with SMF in recent times with slow development cycle (SMF 2.0 has been under development for 4 years), known security holes in the 2.0 RC where left unfixed for months (luckily for us Joomla can fix and release within hours) and some speculation about the manager taking a salary from the SMF funds. This latest controversy does not help the SMF community and is likely to further drive people appart. The best solution is probably for the current SMF manager to step down and create a neutral board to manage SMF, with a better software license. The current manager has spend a lot of time and effort on SMF, but the current controversy is undoing some of her hard work. But just like with children, if you want what is best for them you have got to let them continue in the big wide world without you keeping a tight leesh on them. Hopefully a fresh breeze in the SMF structure will allow healing of the community and allow this great forum software to blossum again.
It just shows how good we have it with Joomla and that there can be open discussion about our problems. Otherwise Amy would have been banned from the Joomla forums for creating this group :)
Thanks, Marius
An example of how not to manage a community can be found at SMF (a free forum software). SMF differs from Joomla in that a commercial company owns the SMF software and that no code changes are allowed by others unless the SMF manager approves this. Joomla on the other hand is GPL software that allows modification by anyone without explicit permission. This was requiring JFusion to make lost of work-arounds to ensure the SMF license was respected (the previous official SMF-Joomla bridge was withdrawn because of license issues).
There has been a recent public fall-out between the SMF owner and SMF team members / developers. A letter from 30 SMF developers / team mebers (both current and former) asked the the manager of SMF to stand down and allow for a not-for-profit organisation to be created for SMF. You can read the blog post by one of the original SMF developers
http://www.lewisonline.ca/?p=426
The SMF manager that was appointed by original SMF developers, refused to step down and create a not-for-profit organisation. Instead she banned the team members that spoke up and refused to sign a new team agreement not to speak up publicity about the issue.
http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=362862.msg2...
The sad thing is that the original developers of SMF are not even allowed to make changes to the code or fork the project, as the code is "owned" by the commercial company. There has been some displeasure with SMF in recent times with slow development cycle (SMF 2.0 has been under development for 4 years), known security holes in the 2.0 RC where left unfixed for months (luckily for us Joomla can fix and release within hours) and some speculation about the manager taking a salary from the SMF funds. This latest controversy does not help the SMF community and is likely to further drive people appart. The best solution is probably for the current SMF manager to step down and create a neutral board to manage SMF, with a better software license. The current manager has spend a lot of time and effort on SMF, but the current controversy is undoing some of her hard work. But just like with children, if you want what is best for them you have got to let them continue in the big wide world without you keeping a tight leesh on them. Hopefully a fresh breeze in the SMF structure will allow healing of the community and allow this great forum software to blossum again.
It just shows how good we have it with Joomla and that there can be open discussion about our problems. Otherwise Amy would have been banned from the Joomla forums for creating this group :)
Thanks, Marius
Views: 75
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Comment by Robert Vining on March 9, 2010 at 2:05am -
I have been following this closely Marius, as SMF is my forum software of choice. It's truly a mess, but with the release of 2.0 RC3 there seems to be a little healing taking place there in the past 2 days. I wish them all the best for sure.
I've read much of what you linked to and more, and it truly is a bad situation that will cause an even slower release cycle for the SMF software. I hope that they can pull together and continue on.
As for how good we have it with Joomla, the software, I couldn't agree with you more. The GPL will keep the project liberated in the end, no matter what direction the leadership or community moves toward in the future. In the end, it won't be any 1 person or group that decides the fate for Joomla.
I certainly hope this new influx of board members can help to drive a new found excitement around the release of 1.6 and we can all move forward on the tough topics we seem to disagree on from time to time.
As you said, the creation of ATAAW has seemed to create just a bit more transparency within our beloved project, but more than that, it has given many of us a place to freely discuss both fun and tough topics with only self moderation taking place.
Ideas seem to just grow here, and that is what I like so much about the way this platform works. That is the beauty of this place, and we have it's members to thank for that.
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Comment by Ewout Wierda on March 9, 2010 at 6:15am -
Unfortunately in spite of the structure of OSM there is a good number of people unhappy about the same things that seem to troubling SMF: a lack of transparency, openness and community collaboration. I think the OSM structure does help a bit - be it as a time delay not failsafe - but really it will always come down to having the right people in the right spot. So, I've placed my bets on the hope that the new board members bring about progress. The GPL is the ultimate insurance policy, but GPL freedom doesn't come for free; it would take a lot of cost and effort to make an insurance claim.
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Comment by Peter Russell on March 9, 2010 at 6:22am -
Yes, Joomla does have the GPL but unfortunately there are too many parallels in this story for us to not be concerned. Let's hope the fresh board members are still vigilant and can digest this knowledge and use it to good effect.
The Emperor's new clothes and all that ... March would be a good month for some proactive movement on that front.
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Comment by Amy Stephen on March 9, 2010 at 6:35am
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Thanks for sharing that Marius. There is a lot to think about in just those two posts.
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Comment by Antonie de Wilde on March 9, 2010 at 7:00am -
License incompatibilities were also the reason we migrated the Joomla forums from SMF to PHPBB a few years ago
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Comment by Marius van Rijnsoever on March 9, 2010 at 7:26am -
Very good point about GPL being an insurance policy for the community.
It is easiest to make a comparison with governments. Everybody dislikes them, they take your hard earned income with high taxes, they can't fulfill all their election promises therefore next time round you vote to have someone else in government. I don't envy OSM, as it is a hard job and nobody thanks you for it. Really who enjoys taking care of the boring paperwork, legalities, etc, but someone has to do it.
However what is happening with SMF is different from a normal government and more like the Zimbabwe dictatorship. If the leader get critisised for not making enough progress or running the country into the ground, you just get rid of the opposition problem solved.
You don't have to be a rocket surgeon (or a brain scientist for that matter :P) to see that getting rid of many team members and dumping the founding developers is not going to solve any productivity issues. Creating a new release is the smartest thing to do release some of the community pressure. But if you had productivity and team issues before, getting rid of valuable team member will only make things worse.
At least with Joomla the community could make a fork to save the project if OSM becomes obstructive. However with SMF even the people who created the code can't do anything with the code they created as it is being held hostage by a manager. Can't beat GPL community insurance and it is free as well :)
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Comment by Victor Drover on March 9, 2010 at 7:50am -
As has been said above, the current fuss within SMF is eerily similar to Joomla's history and the fork from mambo, with some discontent at the current direction. Just look at turnover of the 'core team' for example.
It looks like they tried to hold a peace summit, the failure of which ended up with plans for a new 'mini-CMS' framework with a forum add-onto follow.
On another note, there are a lot of doomsday predictions for SMF, similar to what we've heard for years in joomla.
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Comment by Ivo Apostolov on March 9, 2010 at 8:45am -
Victor - with the main difference SMF is not GPL. And in that case, it is a major difference.
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Comment by Victor Drover on March 9, 2010 at 8:47am
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Yes, but it is an open source project. From SMF to Joomla to WP to Drupal, all have growing pains.
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Comment by Victor Drover on March 9, 2010 at 8:51am
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FYI, this was supposed to be the kumbaya thread, turned into a Death Thread as far as I can tell.
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