[Plone-conference] Openspace: growing plone | as a brand

Jean Jordaan jean.jordaan at gmail.com
Fri Oct 24 02:26:22 UTC 2014


Awesome post from Chris, which pushes me to send this I've been brooding over.

On Tue, Oct 21, 2014 at 4:20 PM, Peter Jacobs <Peter.Jacobs at kuleuven.be> wrote:
> I think this discussion touches only one aspect of the issue how to revive
> Plone: the free-market economics thinking,

Good point ..

> But (and I have only heard and read about this, as I wasn’t involved in
> Plone before 2008) Plone was started by bright minds as a visionary project,
> experimenting and tinkering with ideas that still stand the test of time.
> That must have been a time when many many people worked on Plone out of
> internal motivation and for the sheer fun of it.

I think all long-time Plone collaborators value the community as one of the
really good things about it. But it's not about being visionary or sheer fun.
It's also about being a humane, welcoming place without a lot of bullying.

People aren't just slinging code, they're building a commons that allows
them to make a living in a good way: that includes meeting for sprints all
over the world, working together because of mutual respect and shared values,
learning from different cultures, contributing at their level of comfort or
expertise.

> Unfortunately what is left at this time is a big pile of excellent but
> rapidly aging code (mainly in zope I suspect), that doesn’t invite people to
> play and experiment as much as before.

I'm not so comfortable with people easily labeling code as "rapidly aging".
The goal should be to write code that works fine for at least a decade.
New and cool should be quite irrelevant to systems meant to be relied on.
Is it easier to build bridges or dams or buildings, with all their physical
wear and tear, than to design code? (Might well be! Still, we need to build
reliable systems.)

The real concern with "rapidly aging" code is when that code isn't studied
any more by the people that use it, so the danger is ignorance. It's not
"aging" code, it's "neglected" code.

I'm overstating in the opposite direction, and I'm not saying that code should
be maintained forever --- but neglecting it just makes it even harder to rip
it out when the time comes.

-- 
jean                                              . .. .... //\\\oo///\\


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