[webteam] welcome

[Sander Devrieze]

2007/7/10, Hal Rottenberg <hal at halr9000.com>:
> I think a compromise can be found.

The compromise would be to focus on only one well defined target
group, instead of wanting to do everything. (which doesn't mean I
would like to contribute to such a thing personally, but at least the
chances of survival will be higher I guess).

>  Your input is valuable and you
> obviously have some well thought opinions on some aspects that we all
> care about.  It's just that most of us are prioritizing things
> differently.  I thought long and hard myself about whether it was
> worth making a bit point-by-point reply to you and I decided it
> couldn't be done without hurting feelings which I saw no point in
> doing.

I have no problems with that, I can handle feedback.

> So rather than having you Sander go off and do your own thing,

Well, nobody can force me to compete with myself. What I mean with
this is that I don't want to work on an end user site or an admin site
because I am already doing this on other projects. You still can use
my work because it is copyleft. But I do not feel any advantage in
duplicating my own work :-)

> I ask
> that you give the project some time and redirect your focus into the
> bits that will be in common with both PSA's goal of having an end user
> site

To repeat myself ( and to annoy you by repeating it ;-) ), I think like this:

1) end users:
* proprietary networks have the strongest position here
* proprietary networks have protection from a strong entry barrier:
network effects
* targeting this type of users is extremely difficult
* targeting this type of users successfully will probably result in a
fierce attack from the proprietary network owners
* there are a lot of different types of end users (e.g. you need a
multi-lingual website as mentioned by others)
* sites that target end users already exist

2) existing and potential new contributors:
* Jabber has a key strategic advantage: a protocol community
* not focusing on this might mean we loose the leading position here
* we should leverage this leading position to spread Jabber (e.g. by
trying to convert contributors to projects for proprietary networks to
Jabber)
* we should try to convert popular (open source) projects to integrate
Jabber so that we compete proprietary networks out of the market
* proprietary network owners don't have the resources to kill a
decentalised army of projects focussing on end users, especially if
this are popular projects like Ubuntu, Mozilla, Drupal, Linux,
databases, OpenOffice.org, games, CRM software, and so forth.  Hence,
proprietary network owners will be forced to adopt Jabber or die. They
will die because if they don't support Jabber, their systems will be
incompatible with *a* *lot* popular software.
* contributors are very similar: they speak all English (well, most of
them), they don't have conflicting goals
* attracting new contributors to the Jabber community and making sure
existing ones stay, means that these people will not contribute this
"coding power" on other projects that fall into their interest...if we
can attract a lot people, this will mean "competing" projects will
have less "coding power". "Competing" projects are: multi-protocol
clients, SIP/SIMPLE projects,... If we don't attract people, this will
mean that there are more people available to create choice on
proprietary networks (the first kind of "competing" projects), or we
give Microsoft a tool for its Embrace, Extend and Extinguish strategy
(SIP/SIMPLE). I guess we can easer influence this, than influencing
the end users. (semi off-topic: I'm pretty sure Microsoft don't likes
this at all: http://www.builderau.com.au/news/soa/Windows-developers-begin-slow-defection-to-Linux/0,339028227,339279528,00.htm
...Microsoft will die if they can't stop this evolution...)

<snip>

-- 
Mvg, Sander Devrieze.