Anthony Baxter Meeting, 8 April 2004

On 8 April 2004, Anthony Baxter, a prominent member of the Open Source community (his oeuvre includes spambayes and shtoom) visited OSAF. There were several meetings that Anthony had; these are notes from the Community-oriented one.

Attending: KatieCappsParlante, LisaDusseault, TedLeung, PieterHartsook, DuckySherwood

Anthony noted that OSAF has essentially no interaction with the Python [language] community. He seemed to think that there was a lot of scope for OSAF to interact with the language developers, not only to get bugs fixed, but also to steer the development of the language. He thought the PyCon participation was good, but that the PEP process was also one that we should perhaps be involved in.

[It's also a matter of thinking about 'ok, what do we want from Python' - OSAF has a lot of very smart people working with Python, who've got a lot of experience in other languages - having this expertise participate in the evolution of python would be a very good thing -- AB]

Anthony advocated separating off sub-projects from the main Chandler line and making them independent projects, perhaps even hosted elsewhere (e.g. SourceForge). The benefits would be that

• smaller projects are less intimidating than larger projects,
• external projects are ones that (at least in theory) we wouldn't have to maintain, and
• it might be easier for people to recognize pieces that they could use for their own projects.

He told us to assume that we wouldn't get much from people at first; that we need to have something there before people will get involved. He felt that there is much more involvement when people see things that they can use in their own projects.

Two projects he felt were candidates for spinning off were the repository and the IMAP libraries.

He did point out that there would be a downside to spinning off projects: we might get something slightly different than what we really wanted.

[erm - what this sentence mean? not proper englishosity -- AB]

-- DuckySherwood - 13 Apr 2004

translated ducky-speak to english

-- MikeT - 13 Apr 2004