[Members] Voting criteria

[Richard Dobson]

> I enjoy writing usefull software. That is why I am interested in such 
> steps
> that result in an official JSF software. I write Jabber software just for
> fun and I would also offer my current source to become part of such a
> project.

Of course you would, but what if someone elses project was chosen over yours 
how is that going to make you feel especially if you consider your 
implementation far better, the answer is it would disenfranchise you.

> And why to make it an official JSF project?
>
> Because I think the motivation of some sparetime developers to contribute 
> to
> an opensource projects increases if it is under control of a demcoratic
> (JS)Foundation.

I find that unlikely, linux isnt as far as I know under the control on a 
democratic foundation and there are hundreds if not thousands of people 
contributing to that, what really motivates people to contribute is interest 
in that bit of software or the product area it is in as well as familarity 
with the programming language its written in. Developing something that 
noone else is interested in or doing it in some obscure language is not a 
very good way to get people to contribute, if you want people to contribute 
either you need to get them interested in your software somehow, implement 
something you know lots of people are already interested in, and you must 
ensure you do it in a language that is popular and well known for 
implementing what you are trying to.

> There are tons of OS projects (including mine) but they usually remain
> single developer projects - because a project that basically remains under
> the main control of one single person is not very motivating.

Thats more of an open source software fact of life than anything else, you 
cant just expect people to suddenly discover your project and then start 
contributing, unless your project is very well known, in a product area that 
lots of people are interested in and there arnt better competing 
alternatives that they might want to contribute to instead you arnt going to 
get people contributing out of the blue in that way, it is your job to 
promote your project to other developers and if its interesting to them they 
might contribute, but if its not interesting to them they wont, afterall 
they are not getting paid for doing it, they will do it because they are 
interested in it and they enjoy it, otherwise whats the point.

> Of course I can speak for me only but I would enjoy contributing. I also
> know of many other developers that are interested in jabber software but 
> do
> not have the time to continue their half-complete (sometimes even OS)
> single-developer projects.

Again thats just a fact of life, if those developers dont have the time to 
make their own projects why dont they go and contribute to other peoples 
projects, thats what jabberstudio/sourceforge etc are for, making it a JSF 
official project might help a little bit in that regard, but what would do 
the same job without disenfranchising all the other competing projects that 
wernt picked would be to just publisise all the projects that people can 
contribute to in a central place on the jabber.org website so prospective 
developers can easily look for things they might want to contribute to. 
Another problem other than disenfranchising other projects will likely be 
that you get less new people contributing overall to jabber projects as they 
see the non-official projects as inferior thus not want to contribute to 
those but also might not find anything in the official projects that either 
is interesting to them, that they know the programming language for or they 
might not agree with how it was structured.

Richard