Hi Kristian,
It's always interesting to see your point.To make our discussion more practical I suggest that on this stage of our discussion we should pay more attention to problems what we would like to address and how it can be addressed.
> Hmmm, I finally get your point on that now, and I generally think you> are right about that.
I glad to hear it. It's very important that we came closer to the point where we will be able to define the list of problems.With the list of problems on the hands we will be able to quickly find the way to address them.
>But I am not sure whether there is a> better way of getting this problem resolved.
I'm sure there is.
> - As a developer, one is both sort of a "customer" and a "partner" of a> company involved with a project - in this case Oracle and has an> assigned account.
You got it right. Practically we came to the same conclusion. I mean that you have started to use the word "account"!The word instantly moved up our discussion to new level.Now we will speed up :)We are going in right direction, no doubts here.Other differences between our opinions is not that important. It's just some tactical questions or matter of opinion on this or that.
> - This "assigned account" is billed whenever the> "developer"/"partner"/"customer" is about to use services provided by> the company, according to rules and billing conditions that need to> be clear in advance. This procedure happens, getting back to your> initial suggestion, using "virtual money". To pay a bill, a "partner"> needs to have a sufficient account of "virtual money".
Something like this should works, but take in account that we will need to build infrastructure that support this approach.For example if for help on forum we are getting some dukes than forum software should support transferring money, presenting how much everybody have in account and so on.Imagine situation where let's say five developers need the help on the same question then they pretty quickly establish the duke's fund and naturally pretty quickly somebody will go for it. You will see appearing such new professions as bug/bounty hunter, tip/advice providers and so on.
> Though this sounds sane, I see a couple of problems with that approach:> - At first, it is a general matter of business models, and I wonder> whether Oracle is up for such an approach (though it surely would be> nice :) )
I doubt that Oracle will go for it without some proofs that it will benefit them.After all their business are going well and there is a common tendency that way the business is going changed only in case when it is going down. We should create some kind of working prototype to be able to convince them.It makes sense to create pretty basic infrastructure that support duke's financial system and start to use them between us.Again I'm going with the example as my weapon. My team have started to create some tutorials and slideshow that should allow future users to learn in quick way how to work with the medical enterprise system that we are developing. I need somebody with good writing skills in English to help us to make it pleasant to read. So I will pay some dukes to convince you to review a couple of our small tutorials. By the way is there something for what you are ready to spend your dukes?Also we will establish the system that will pay dukes to developers who is filing the bugs from Fishcat community fund.After the infrastructure will start to work we will be able to get leverage in time of negotiation with Glassfish team.Maybe Richard shouldn't initiate at this time the trading agreement with them. Just to know if they will go for it when time is right should be sufficient. >I remember a discussion like that on the NetBeans (NetCAT) mailing list
>a while ago when some people, after NetCAT finished (NetCAT used to
>have the approach of providing "winners" (...) with t-shirts, these
>days), asked whether it wouldn't be possible to provide them with sweat
>shirts or some more "valuable" clothing instead of just tees, and one
>of the NetBeans folks used to ask "what? free IDE isn't enough?"We will pay them a couple thousands dukes for their free IDE and will start trade with them also.Netbeans folk will get much more value when duke trade way will be started because some people will hunt for bugs and another people will fix them to get 5/10 times bigger award comparing to people who is catching bugs. That means not really additional efforts will be need from Netbeans team.
> - Then again, you immediately end up with a problem of> making things "measurable" again. How much does it cost to fix an> issue you reported, according to some official support billing> conditions?
This is excellent question you rise here.The first of all like in offline life with the regular money we don't have to put strict price tags on everything. We will provide just some kind of guidelines regarding prices to help people to start doing business. Remember you talked about "focusing" testing to implement it. Judy as testing manager could rise the prices for bugs in areas where she needs to do it.The second pretty important thing to take in account that our virtual currency will work in the same time as currency and as some kind of public shares. In fact the dukes will be superior comparing to regular money and regular shares because of two reasons.The first reason is that a real value of "soft"/online things constantly in movement up and down and no way for regular currency to keep up with it. After all value of regular currency depends from government and common financial politics of the state with out direct dependence from things that going on in online world. The second reason is related to how shares are working. In ideal situation shares suppose to represent a real value for the company who issued them, but in fact this model is failing all time in this regard. It failed because there is no real mechanism to properly define value of the particular company. As opposite dukes value will adjust automatically when situation is changed. One day you could buy advice for two dukes and another day you could have it for just one duke because more people joined to forum and interesting in dukes way of doing business.
> conditions? How much "virtual money" are you capable of earning doing> open source work? How much, in example, does "virtual money"> represent in terms of value compared to, say, an hour of work you> spent, billed and got paid for "in offline life"? If, by then, you> end up with earning, say, 10 dukes for filing a qualified bug report> and you know that, talking about mission critical support, fixing an> issue costs (the virtual-money-equivalent-of-) 500 dukes, you have> quite some way to go to get meaningful results out of that. In perspective market "owned" by dukes will be much bigger than market of USA or Germany :)Just calculate how much value have all information based products such as software, online services, design, music, movie and many other things. Plus no taxes, no exchange rates between different currencies and so on.I'm pretty serious here. For example take exactly one hundred a good developers and they potentially could create pretty quickly a huge value. The more value developers produce the more stronger online currency will become. So looks like we will need to be ready to produce plenty of the dukes :) Why we need to use bucks if we can create much better currency ourself.
> and detail level of bug reports to be posted, ...). Would you be> capable of, in example, postpone any other project work if FishCAT> required you to rebuild GlassFish and perform some relevant test> _immediately_ to get a meaningful reward in terms of "virtual money"?
That is main the goal on this stage to make situation that will allow Judy or somebody else from Oracle to be able to use dukes in amount that is enough to get things done promptly. I see win-win situation here.
> I am not sure whether / how FishCAT in terms of Oracle organizational> structures is strong enough to, about that, establish a meaningful> environment for such a model, or whether it would be better to keep> things separated, to know the people involved with FishCAT are all kind> and friendly and doing the best they can to help you out in times of> need, knowing that in the end, given mission-critical requirements and> deadlines, it's all about a professional SLA and money? I am not sure> about that, honestly... Judy? ;)
I'm sure there is no established politics in place from Oracle side regarding Fishcat status.It's understandable after all they just don't know what we will be able to accomplish.We should just start to do some experiments and move forward. Judy and Glassfish team will have a time to decide how to proceed further.But we should keep initiative here and try to push them to accept our business model :)Judy, in case there is a some kind of clearly defined policy from Oracle side regarding Fishcat activities please let us know.
> Lest to say: By now better than before I understand your point, but I> thoroughly wonder whether there is a way of addressing this> meaningfully. Wouldn't be bad, though. ;)
Kristian, as you see I'm trying hard to convince you and get support from you :)Give me a chance to prove everything in practice. I'm sure step by step we will be able to make something meaningful.
> Oh, no no no, SpringSource in example is pretty successful doing what> they do using tomcat, and they never really had a problem with "latest> technologies" - they always, in example, worked pretty well with the
I had my reasons to say the words about Tomcat, probably it wasn't completely fair to the Tomcat team. After all I used Tomcat for a while for free. Feel sorry for that, especially seeing that you took it too close to heart. Anyway I should say that Glassfish team is very powerful entity and deserved a lot of dukes that for sure :)
> Have a look at the Eclipse Developer Report> > http://www.eclipse.org/org/press-release/20100604_survey2010.php
Pretty interesting numbers over there.
> - application server used in production environment (tomcat coming in> first, with GlassFish left at painfully low 3.9% ... :/ ),
In some way it's good because the team has problem and there are a more chances they will go after business model that will resolve their issue. We could use those numbers at time of negotiation with Glassfish.For example promise to help to increase the market share and so on :)
> - open source maturity in general (which, asides that, is irritating to> see the large amount of people "using open source" but not> communicating back to the community in any way).
Both sides are loosing the power in this situation. One of the biggest weak point of open source model.This issue should be easy for dukes to fix.
> all based upon standards, can easily "scale up" given the need. At> least to me, this doesn't seem a business model too bad.
For huge amount of people this business model is not good because the model can't support them financially. According to report above 12.1 percents of developers that are using Eclipse is not affiliated with an organization.Probably they are freelancers. This part of people will need dukes much more than people who is working in company.By the way don't expect from them to do much volunteer work, they probably too busy to keep themselves on the fly. But it doesn't mean that we don't have to help them right?
> - Finally: Look at an ant population. A tribe, which indeed is> effective in what it does. :)
Completely agree with you on this!Only question is if they produce so much value why they are not able to produce currency that will be based on the value they produce. Build some island in pacific ocean start produce bananas there and then you can introduce the currency to start trade with the others island. Isn't it natural?It seems to me a classic schema.
> No common goals? _That_ is exactly what I mean in my discussion to talk> about a rewarding system! ;) If the _only_ common goal attracting> people here is the goal of getting reward, I honestly question whether> these are the users to have around. The _common goal_ should be pretty> clear initially: Make GlassFish better. To do so, FishCAT should> attract people who are willing to agree with this common goal.
You can make Glassfish better without going to Fishcat program.Where are the common goals in context of being FichCat's member?
One more perspective for using dukes.In a few months I'm going to market with some kind of medenterprise platform.And my client will get dukes for referral, for smart suggestions, for reporting about problems and so on.Then they will be able to order some custom functionality from us for the same dukes they honestly earned.Guess who will win market with this kind of business model me or my competitors :)
I should go to sleep now. It took me hours to write this letter and I don't have a time now to respond to your second letter and Judy's letters.I can't understand why it takes from me so long to write the letter ;)Kristian, it would be interesting to know how fast you wrote your letter.
Best regards,Vladimir
> Date: Tue, 29 Jun 2010 10:24:25 +0200
> From: rink_at_planconnect.de
> To: quality_at_glassfish.dev.java.net
> Subject: Re: Request for comments : FishCAT, the way forward
>
> Hi Vladimir;
>
> nice reading from you again. ;)
>
> > Hi Kristian,I'm sitting now on the bed and looks like I have one or
> > two hours to fight with you a good fight :)We will see yet who is
> > more stubborn you or me :)
>
> Let's see, indeed. :)
>
>
>
> > This is a good question, let me try to answer on it.It would be wrong
> > to separate people from perspective of one project.For example you
> > are fighting bugs inside of Glassfish and I'm fighting bugs inside of
> > Netbeans.We both are using the projects. One day I will need
> > desperately that Glassfish team very quickly fix some issue with the
> > server.Because I didn't hunting for Glassfish before I don't have any
> > influence on the team. So I'm stuck. And it's not fair because I did
> > my share of volunteer job working with Netbeans team.You should
> > understand that I don't have unlimited time on my hands to fight in
> > all directions.
>
>
> Hmmm, I finally get your point on that now, and I generally think you
> are right about that. The "easy" answer would be: There is a difference
> between being active in an open source community and having "mission
> critical" support at hand (in terms of getting developer questions
> answered / real-world project problems fixed in a reliable amount of
> time). If interacting in an open-source environment, communication and
> collaboration is sort of "loosely coupled", and you have to rely upon
> the very idea that everyone (including you, hopefully) contributes as
> good as (s)he can so in the end most questions will quickly be answered
> if there are enough people around - this seems a simple matter of
> probability and statistics. If you need a more "reliable" playing
> ground, you'd be better off buying support with a pre-defined SLA.
>
> But this indeed is an impolite answer given someone is active in an
> open-source community or project. But I am not sure whether there is a
> better way of getting this problem resolved. To make this completely
> "meaningful", it would end up with a model more or less like this:
>
> - As a developer, one is both sort of a "customer" and a "partner" of a
> company involved with a project - in this case Oracle and has an
> assigned account.
>
> - This "assigned account" is billed whenever the
> "developer"/"partner"/"customer" is about to use services provided by
> the company, according to rules and billing conditions that need to
> be clear in advance. This procedure happens, getting back to your
> initial suggestion, using "virtual money". To pay a bill, a "partner"
> needs to have a sufficient account of "virtual money".
>
> - To fill the account of "virtual money", either real-world money
> payment can be used (exchange real to "virtual" money), or the
> "partner" can be active in some open-source environment (providing
> bug descriptions, goin' through test cases, reviewing documentation,
> that kind of stuff).
>
> Though this sounds sane, I see a couple of problems with that approach:
> - At first, it is a general matter of business models, and I wonder
> whether Oracle is up for such an approach (though it surely would be
> nice :) ).
>
> - Then again, you immediately end up with a problem of
> making things "measurable" again. How much does it cost to fix an
> issue you reported, according to some official support billing
> conditions? How much "virtual money" are you capable of earning doing
> open source work? How much, in example, does "virtual money"
> represent in terms of value compared to, say, an hour of work you
> spent, billed and got paid for "in offline life"? If, by then, you
> end up with earning, say, 10 dukes for filing a qualified bug report
> and you know that, talking about mission critical support, fixing an
> issue costs (the virtual-money-equivalent-of-) 500 dukes, you have
> quite some way to go to get meaningful results out of that.
>
> - If talking about being rewarded with a decent amount of "virtual
> money" for getting something done, it will either be not more than a
> "symbolic reward" again unless there will be significantly more
> strict conditions to be met (times for tests to be performed, quality
> and detail level of bug reports to be posted, ...). Would you be
> capable of, in example, postpone any other project work if FishCAT
> required you to rebuild GlassFish and perform some relevant test
> _immediately_ to get a meaningful reward in terms of "virtual money"?
>
>
> I am not sure whether / how FishCAT in terms of Oracle organizational
> structures is strong enough to, about that, establish a meaningful
> environment for such a model, or whether it would be better to keep
> things separated, to know the people involved with FishCAT are all kind
> and friendly and doing the best they can to help you out in times of
> need, knowing that in the end, given mission-critical requirements and
> deadlines, it's all about a professional SLA and money? I am not sure
> about that, honestly... Judy? ;)
>
> Lest to say: By now better than before I understand your point, but I
> thoroughly wonder whether there is a way of addressing this
> meaningfully. Wouldn't be bad, though. ;)
>
>
> > You have mention before about some successful open source
> > projects including Tomcat. I used before Tomcat in my work and I know
> > it's not really a good example of successful project. It took years
> > for the project to catch up with some new technologies and in current
> > situation this kind of application server is good fit only to use in
> > school project.
>
> Oh, no no no, SpringSource in example is pretty successful doing what
> they do using tomcat, and they never really had a problem with "latest
> technologies" - they always, in example, worked pretty well with the
> latest and most "bleeding-edge" versions of Spring framework. Whether
> or not this is your technological choice definitely is up to you. Many,
> eventually way too many, environments successfully use tomcat in
> productive setups, and they do that absolutely on intention,
> re-iterating the fact that "Java EE is way too large and too bloated"
> to be useful. I don't agree with that, but that doesn't change things.
> Have a look at the Eclipse Developer Report
>
> http://www.eclipse.org/org/press-release/20100604_survey2010.php
>
> in example talking about...
>
> - people generally using open-source platforms as deployment
> environment (including operating systems and database, not just
> talking about development environments),
>
> - application server used in production environment (tomcat coming in
> first, with GlassFish left at painfully low 3.9% ... :/ ),
>
> - open source maturity in general (which, asides that, is irritating to
> see the large amount of people "using open source" but not
> communicating back to the community in any way).
>
> However, talking about tomcat along the lines of "school projects" is
> definitely a dangerous thing to do. ;)
>
>
>
>
>
> > For me, nowadays open source projects looks like primitives tribes
> > comparing to civilization.Even for barter activities tribes have
> > nothing to use. It's just shame ;)Of course I see weakness of open
> > source projects from economics and politics points of view.
>
> Well, okay, I accept your point of view on that, even though I can not
> really share or agree with it. Some thoughts on that:
>
> - Looking at companies like IBM or RedHat, I see commercial entities
> which are modestly to pretty successful and both are supporting and
> promoting (at least partly, talking about IBMs involvement into the
> Eclipse foundation or its GNU/Linux activities) open source
> technologies. They wouldn't do right this if open source was all poor
> and weak technology, would they? ;)
>
> - Imagine you are trying to start a small company about to provide
> customers with service of doing custom application development and
> integration. What would you do? Would you ask them to go for, say, an
> Oracle WebLogic or an IBM WebSphere license first? Then, eventually,
> these customers immediately would go to IBM and Oracle and also get
> consulting and support there, and your company would be out of
> business. So, would you try implementing an application server first?
> This would keep you busy a couple of years in which you would have to
> find some solid fundings without having an actual way of revenue
> since, until your application server implementation is ready, you
> don't have anything to offer to your customers. Difficult, as well.
> What about, in example, adopting an open source framework based upon
> standards (say, an open source Java EE 5 or 6 certified application
> server), eventually supporting its original developers and offering
> business and consulting on top of this platform? This way, both would
> benefit - the application platform you chose would benefit from your
> willingness to support it, to provide input and eventually funding,
> your company would benefit from having a stable, reliable platform
> infrastructure, and your customers would benefit from having
> affordable consulting and services on top of a platform which, after
> all based upon standards, can easily "scale up" given the need. At
> least to me, this doesn't seem a business model too bad.
>
> - If comparing open source to tribes: Yes, why not. Another comparison
> I tend to hear, once in a while, is the comparison of small, flexible
> boats outperforming the large, heavyweight tankers. Just take a look
> at the KDE desktop environment for Unix systems, especially at its
> very infrastructure: Technically, this is definitely the most
> innovative system out there to date. Despite some visual
> shortcomings, this is what neither Apple nor Microsoft so far managed
> to come up with. Microsoft could have if they eventually decided to
> drop all the borked infrastructure and compatibility crap and build a
> system all on top of .NET, but so far they didn't for whichever
> reasons. This, tribe or not, is where open source excels in my
> opinion: It's a way of unifying smart minds all across the world,
> which are capable implementing things _and_ want to do that in an
> environment not mainly driven by commercial and economic motivations
> (which, asides all the need there is, of course always will limit the
> technical quality of a solution as in the end it will be a
> feature-vs.-cost decision). Plus, in open source you have some setup
> way more prominent than in "proprietary" development: You have
> developers which are users of their software, too, so they know best
> what makes their stuff inefficient / hard to use. Throwing in users
> who are willing to provide input like this is a certain way to make
> things better.
>
> - Finally: Look at an ant population. A tribe, which indeed is
> effective in what it does. :)
>
>
> > is more stronger than yours.For example how you see that we can act
> > as team if we have nothing to share. No common projects, no common
> > infrastructure, no common points/dukes, no common goals.I don't see
> > much point for people to join Fishcat.Why would they?
>
> No common goals? _That_ is exactly what I mean in my discussion to talk
> about a rewarding system! ;) If the _only_ common goal attracting
> people here is the goal of getting reward, I honestly question whether
> these are the users to have around. The _common goal_ should be pretty
> clear initially: Make GlassFish better. To do so, FishCAT should
> attract people who are willing to agree with this common goal.
>
> Cheers & all the best,
> Kristian
>
>
> --
> Dipl.-Ing.(BA) Kristian Rink * Software- und Systemingenieur
> planConnect GmbH * Könneritzstr. 33 * 01067 Dresden
> fon: 0351 215 203 71 * cell: 0176 2447 2771 * mail: rink_at_planconnect.de
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