asimbaig wrote:Come out of the closet, will you and post your real name. Tell me who you are and what you do for a living? Recruiter? ....I bet you are. In fact, I will give $100 to a charity of your choice, if you prove me wrong.....tell everyone on the forum, how many placements did you make last year for free?
I'm not the object of your ire, but I'll qualify my comments according to your metrics.
I'm a temporary recruiter, as well as running a non-profit arts project (which I set up with £200k of my own money specifically to offer free and low-cost services to the arts world), a market research business, a headhunting business and some software interests. On a quick count, I did 20 placements for free last year. I'm happier as a result
asimbaig wrote:there WAS NO developer base. Thats the problem. 5000 posts on the forum...practically no code contribution. Developers are just not interested in a business applications. We wrote ALL the code, every line....you uninformed *&%#^. Go read the code. You will see it.
With respect, I employed paid developers to work on CATS. If it were not for the CPL I'd have contributed all of it back to you. As it is we were going to modularise it to avoid the license problems. Some of it we would have charged money for (where it involved proprietary code from elsewhere), some of it we would have put back for free (and charged for integration / support). Now we have no marketplace (well, a few people here), no project to contribute back to, and no CATS-based business.
Your choice of licence makes a huge difference. Sugar (an example you've used) works because the module framework allows contributions, and because a lot of the developers are system integrators who will build, deploy and maybe host a custom version of the code. The CPL kills some avenues of revenue for third party developers, the lack of a stable codebase and roadmap killed some more of it. Sure, Sugar's licence is CPL-like (although a lot less restrictive), but the value is in the add-ons.
Since the CPL scuppered the obvious business model, the next-best thing was to write modules to do things. But with the code changing so rapidly, and without notice, how could we keep up? It just wasn't stable enough to try to support module users in the real world.
asimbaig wrote:We have the right to terminate the project as we see fit. We DID NOT have a developer community.
IMHO that statement is why you don't have a developer community. We could all see that, we could all see that Cognizo didn't (seem to) want anyone else to make money. Without money to be made, who develops? You didn't do it out of charitable intent, why should we? Unfortunately, from my perspective, the way CATS has been structured encouraged lots of small (and not-so-small) end-users to use it for free, but did not appeal to those who actually develop code for verticals (systems integrators, consultants, and so on), not least because IMHO the CPL stopped their business stone dead. You're unusual (as am I) as a recruiter who codes.
asimbaig wrote:Go look at sourceforge. 80% of the projects are abandoned.
Yes, and most of those are because they tried to reinvent the wheel, tried to pander to the egos of those involved, weren't really interesting, had a crap idea, had no roadmap or direction or leadership, and so on. Sourceforge is a great place to throw up a "project" and a bad place to build a community.
Anyhow, CATS is now amongst them... almost!
asimbaig wrote:How do I know it, because I actually have written and used open source for 17 years. I have contributed real code (not opinions like you) to real projects. We wrote code, gave it for free.
That's always the problem, that "free" bit. It (to me, at least) denotes a mental link between code and money, which doesn't perhaps go to the heart of the OS software debate. The business isn't always in the code these days, of course not, it is in the overall offering. I'd have looked at 30k users and tried to work out how to monetize some of them, rather than begrudging them for getting the software for no outlay.
asimbaig wrote:The community that you refer to are recruiters mostly...who used CATS to run their businesses. There's about 12 guys who have posted 90% of all posts on the forums. 12 users posting regularly....30,000 downloads. How many active CATS installations is that....go figure. Where are the 29,900+ users??
Well, for one, what is the case with other OS projects? Second, as you say, recruiters don't code. If I'd wanted to build a business around CATS (in the abstract) I'd have offered managed servers. I'd have bug-fixed for clients and posted the code back to you. I'd have developed the code because it would help my business and your business. But I'd have wanted to be guaranteed in return that my business wouldn't die tomorrow because you pulled the roadmap. And I'd not want to write and contribute new features until I knew that there was a framework to do them under and a license that kept those contributions open. There we go, that's why I didn't do what I wanted to originally when I saw the code, because the CPL didn't let me. And again you wonder why there were so few developers adding things?
Instead I paid developers to work in-house for me, adapting the code because I couldn't rely on the roadmap. I've already told you what the plan was, but that is dead for now as the whole thing has gone away. And yet you wonder why nobody else was as daft as me to invest in this project when it was clear what could happen at any time?
Anyhow, this will run and run. I'm NOT trying to flame you. I DO understand the investment you've made. And I knew all along that it was your code to do with as you saw fit, rather than any sort of true open source project, and hence you could pull it at any time. Now you have, we have to see what we can make with what is left. Sadly the CPL remains in place, so we'll have to be a bit creative in how we work out how to recoup development time invested. But as I've said elsewhere, none of this should take away from the achievement you and your team have made in realising CATS, nor should it prevent us for being grateful for the chance to do something with the code.