[Dspace-general] DSpace Position Paper - HP Labs (fwd)

[MacKenzie Smith]

Hi Tom,

I was going to respond to your post on dspace-tech, but since you copied it 
here I'll reply to both lists at once. First let me say that I don't 
presume to speak for Rob, or HP Labs, in any way... I just represent how 
MIT fits into the DSpace open source software community, and I have talked 
to HP about their ongoing interests so I know a bit about where they're 
coming from.
I'd also like to point out that the institution you work for (Cambridge 
University) has a very active 'committer' in the person of Jim Downing, and 
that he might have opinions about some of this too.
But here's my take on it:

-- At the user group meeting last March there was clear consensus that 
DSpace should behave like other large/growing open source software 
projects, and expand its development process to be more inclusive of people 
from all the institutions who depend on the platform. That's why we created 
the DSpace 'committer' group to manage the codebase, which you have a 
representative on. This is standard practice in open source software 
projects, and is based loosely on the Apache Foundation's model.

-- We also said then (and have repeatedly said since) that both MIT and HP 
are committed to remaining actively involved in the DSpace project, but 
will, as is standard practice in OSS communities, be focusing our limited 
resources on the things that our organizations need most. We have in the 
past devoted some resources to features that we didn't need ourselves, but 
that is likely to become less common over time, as other institutions pick 
up some of the load, including yours.

-- A thriving, successful open source software community can *only* exist 
if *many* people are involved, and not just the originators (in fact, 
there's a belief in some OSS quarters that a good project doesn't really 
take off until the originator leave completely so that the community feels 
free to do whatever they need to... we don't think we need to go that far, 
but it's an illustrative point of view). As long as the user community 
thinks of the originating organizations as a sort of unpaid vendor, the 
thing will never work.

All of which goes to say that HP should focus on what HP wants from DSpace, 
and right now that's the 2.0 architecture and a migration plan for getting 
from here to there. But I think everyone realizes that development on the 
1.x tree can't stop while 2.0 is being developed, so we (collectively) need 
to be a bit creative about how to support both a short-term 1.x development 
track and a 2.0 development track that neatly merge in a year or two. This 
might turn out to be impossible, but that's the challenge for the 
committers group, and particularly those working on the 2.0 effort.

Since DSpace is now a full-blown open source software project, what HP and 
MIT do in relation to it should be somewhat irrelevant in the big picture, 
except of course that we have some great programmers and good ideas about 
where DSpace should go :-) So in a way, you shouldn't feel you need to ask 
this question. If you want things to go one way or the other, lobby your 
representative on the committers group (or get someone on the group if you 
aren't represented). That's my opinion anyway, and I'll let Rob answer for 
HP when he's back in town.

MacKenzie



At 01:54 PM 7/29/2004 +0100, Tom De Mulder wrote:

>I sent the mail below to DSpace-tech, but I thought it might be useful to
>post here, too, since I think quite a few people here work at institutions
>that are using DSpace 1.2 and might be worried about a sudden switch to
>2.0 architecture leaving the 1.x branch behind.
>
>I'd personally most like to hear MacKenzie's viewpoint on this - what's
>MIT's stance?
>
>--
>Tom De Mulder <tdm27 at cam.ac.uk> - Cambridge University Computing Service
>                    New Museums Site, Pembroke Street, Cambridge CB2 3QH
>-> 29/07/2004 : The Moon is Waxing Gibbous (72% of Full)
>
>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2004 15:20:53 +0100 (BST)
>From: Tom De Mulder <tdm27 at cam.ac.uk>
>To: dspace-tech <dspace-tech at lists.sourceforge.net>
>Subject: DSpace Position Paper - HP Labs
>
>Hello all (and esp. Rob and the folks at MIT),
>
>I was reading HP's Position Paper 
>(http://wiki.dspace.org/index.php/HpPositionPaper)
>and noticed the following:
>
>"We believe all of the above goals are best served by concentrating on
>moving DSpace to the proposed 'version 2.0' architecture as soon as
>possible. This is where our efforts will henceforth be focussed."
>
>Does this mean that the 1.x branch won't be further developed by HP? What
>about bug fixes and feature requests?
>
>--
>Tom De Mulder <tdm27 at cam.ac.uk> - Cambridge University Computing Service
>                    New Museums Site, Pembroke Street, Cambridge CB2 3QH
>-> 28/07/2004 : The Moon is Waxing Gibbous (64% of Full)
>_______________________________________________
>Dspace-general mailing list
>Dspace-general at mit.edu
>http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/dspace-general

MacKenzie Smith
Associate Director for Technology
MIT Libraries
Building 14S-308
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA  02139
(617)253-8184
kenzie at mit.edu