Hello World,

English isn't my primary language... please be comprehensive!

First, I'm fairly new to OS realities and projects. In that post, I would like to discuss about limitations that I've noticed in the OS world. Further, it could be interesting to discuss about a projet that could overcome those limitations.
One could say... what do you know about OS limitation... you are new to OS. And that's exactly why I want to discuss THAT, HERE! I want to confront my ideas with people envolved in OS reality.

First, define limitation please!
In a perfect software development world, EVERY quality software shall be open sourced, easily accessible. OS actors could work with the same framework independently of their prefered programming language/application developed. This means that community, individuals, company, etc. could use quality software for free. (ok, we are going in that direction but we could do it really faster, IMOO) This could lead to better organization of small communities around the world that don't have those millions to buy/maintain commercial quality software. (Please note that it's my definition of a perfect software development world and I am aware that there is free quality software already avalaible.. aren't we on the jboss site) The limitation I talk about is the gap between that definition (which is large enough to imagine whatever you want) and the real world.

Ok fine, now you all know that I'm a dreamer! Let's talk.

Limitations
- OS actors have only small amounts of time to think/develop/test/etc OS software (As far as I know, most individuals contributing OS aren't paid for that, most of them have to get a parallel job);
- Users are not envolved in the development process and they are not interested to be. Some of them contribute by giving money, some of them contribute by giving there time.... but this percentage is low! (<= this is hypothetic) Why? How could we have this percentage higher?;
- There are plenty of identical functionnalities that are developed in several programming languages/several differents projects... It could be interesting (some could say utopian) to share those functionnalities. There is no easily accessible structure to helps us doing it.
- Work accomplish by OS actors is shared at a chunky level (libs/components/application). There is no structure that could allow them to share EASILY at a fine grained level.

Please, react! Agree/disagree? whants to add some comments, provide some thought? some statistics?

This is the point of vue of a software architect that moves to OS. Going from Micro$ technologies where everything is holded by a single company (thus is interoperable/structured) to a world where diversity is the key word... Is it possible to match diversity, structure and interoperability?

I think that yes... and when it's gonna be done, some rich asses will be kicked. Are you interested to discuss about project ideas that could transforms those limitations into strenghts?

ejad
Rêve ou Réalité!