| Trek: |
Have you considered moving the code to a social hosting site like github or bitbucket so it's easier for people to contribute?
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| Ziba: |
That's what we intend to do with Collage and a number of our other projects. One of the hold ups is that is so nice and easy to take UM specific short cuts to implement authentication (cosign) and authorization (umod). We're hesitant to put things in a really public space that aren't ready to be re-used by external organizations without work. When we either give up that ideal or find spare time to implement these features for a non-UM audience, we'll post them right away.
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| Trek: |
I think you're logic is backwards. You make it public so that people can refractor the umich-specific parts if that's useful to them. Every OSS project starts out only meeting the specific needs of its creators. You make it public so it can become generally applicable, not make it generally applicable so it can become public.
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| Ziba: |
I agree that an OSS project can have the life cycle you describe. The question now isn't really about going "public." The source has always been available to the public. It's more a matter of convenience, promotional timing and our availability to properly foster/moderate a potential developer community surrounding collage. In the meantime, to make it more convenient for contributors, the tarballs that have always been at: http://develop.www.umich.edu/collage/source/ now include the .git directory for our repository. The remote repository can't be interacted with, but it should ease patch creation a bit. |
