[kde-community] About ocs-server future

[Sebastian Kügler]

Hi Claudio,

Since you addressed me directly, and I was involved with the process, I'd like 
to chime in here.

On Thursday, January 14, 2016 06:55:37 PM Claudio Desideri wrote:
> We'd loved to continue development of ocs-server (and clients) but the
> current status of things seems not too encouraging.

I'm glad to hear that you're still interested in ocs-server, but at the same 
time I'm puzzled, because that is not what you told me when we talked 
extensively about the project. You told me that you are not planning to work 
on ocs-server in your free time, but would be available to get paid to do it. 
If you would get paid to, you'd participate in a meeting. 
I went out on a limb to even get you pocket money (which is highly unusual for 
such meetings) which you requested, on top of covering your other expenses, 
just for you to be able to participate. You canceled your attendance for 
reasons unrelated to the project, at least that's what you told me, only 2 
days before the meeting.

I made really sure (told you multiple times, I just reviewed the IRC logs, I'm 
happy to send them to you if you find that your memory is lacking) that we're 
looking at it open-mindedly, and if you care about the subject, I would try 
hard to get roadblocks removed for you to participate. You chose not to.

If you feel being met with unfairness, I'm sorry to hear that, but after 
having another critical look at how things went down exactly, I think you're 
misrepresenting important facts (I could point out many of them in your email, 
but I don't think it really contributes to the discussion, not any more than 
asking you to re-read the parent email asking yourself what are facts, and 
which parts are your own assumptions.) 
Next time you have doubts, questions, or somesuch, and you're struggling to 
find answers, please reach out to me before coming to conclusions that may be 
based on misinformation and incorrect assumptions. Until you do that, please 
assume positive intentions of those involved.

I did a review of the code of the ocs-server project, focusing on code quality 
and maturity, feature completeness and maintainability to get an idea if it 
could be a replacement for existing OCS services in the near future. You told 
me yourself that it has architectural and practical security flaws. Problems 
I've found during review is that the code is rather incomplete so it can't be 
a short term replacement for existing OCS services offered by opendesktop.org, 
there hasn't been any substantial activity after your GSoC project, and a 
general low level of quality leading to maintenance problems down the road. 
Another issue I've found was the relative immaturity of the project, and that 
progress was mostly limited to periods during GSoC (there hasn't been a single 
commit to ocs-server after the pencils down deadline this year in August, for 
example). I didn't get the impression that it's a healthy project, and lengthy 
conversation with you didn't convince me otherwise.

> they told us our project could be merged or shut down because the 
> community doens't allow concurrent implementations inside KDE)

I'm not sure who told you that. There's a long list of past events which prove 
otherwise, Konqueror vs. Rekonq to name a popular one. KDE doesn't "shut down" 
projects, and there are mechnisms in place which make this impossible: our 
open and inclusive processes and the very nature of Free software licenses.

Cheers,
-- 
sebas

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