On 26/09/11 12:54, Marvin Humphrey wrote:
Well, controlling entities for open source projects have to be responsive to their communities. If they are not, they get forked, or people move on to other things.
... or this "community" makes arrangements to be able to contribute to a codebase which is more widely accessible, while keeping that codebase in reasonable sync with the more tightly monitored and controlled original, and pushes those contributions upstream whenever possible.
That way you may get the best of both worlds - a more volatile extended version, with features added by this "community", and a more stable vanilla version which adopts some of these features when integrating them fits with the long term plans and/or the available time of this "controlling entity" (and of course when they are available in a suitable license - which any patch offered upstream should be).
But this is not a suggestion for the future, it is the arrangement that has been in place for some years now ... as the one that seems to suit both the "community" and the "controlling entity" that you refer to.
Then you can also choose which version to use, depending on whether you want the extra features, or you can't use the licenses in the extended version, or you want to maximise portability, etc etc. And if you wish to offer patches you can push them to the extended version, have them integrated with the other "community" work, then propose them as working, tested and perhaps popular for the vanilla version ... or you can propose patches directly to the vanilla version and wait for the outcome.
Simon