Open letter of OTRS

[xhoy]

Today I saw the letter of Christopher Kuhn[1] (on behave of otrs i guess).

And I got the some kind of weird feeling when i read it.... Some days ago i read the open letter[2] from OtterHub.

Since i don't feel the need to talk about the package verification specific, I do feel the need to talk about the 'tone of voice'.
I think xxx made a great effort the last few years to improve OTRS (see the 3.0 remake, ideascale[3], move to Github[4], community blog [5]).

But still as an OTRS administrator/user I feel that xxx is ‘moving’ away from being an true open source project. I can understand that they would like more feedback and input from the community. They did the right thing to move to github. but the bugtracker is still in the wrong place. And since they moved to github I almost committed a patch for a problem (which is more than before!).

I have the feeling that xxx lost a bit of touch with the community and tries to privates OTRS and get you in to some 10.000euro contract. I send then an email, that I would love to give them around 1000E euro a year[6], about the same we pay for Atlassians Confluence wiki[7] in exchange for some feature add-ons (there are 25 right now [8]). Did you know when you payed xxx 36.865 Euro you only get 10 ‘free’ Add-ons? When I ask about this the only response I got was “we sell service contracts not feature add-ons’….
I don’t want a service contract, I know how OTRS works, I know the bugtracker and I can open the code myself. And most of the time, the code isn’t even the problem!

I think if OTRS doesn’t feel they are get the credits for their work, they should open up the community more and stop acting like a 5 year-old that is treated unfairly.
OTRS is a great product, and has great features since they moved to github, it feel much more open and I think their problem will eventually disappear by its self.

I love to hear from all of you what you think about this.

Thomas

PS: i don't know if this is the right post to write, but it fled good posting it!


[1] http://www.otrs.com/en/company/news/pre ... terhub-ev/
[2] http://www.otterhub.org/de/2013/07/01/o ... o-otrs-ag/
[3] https://otrsteam.ideascale.com/
[4] http://blog.otrs.org/2013/02/26/otrs-now-on-github/
[5] http://blog.otrs.org/
[6] http://www.otrs.com/fileadmin/mediafile ... remise.pdf
[7] https://www.atlassian.com/software/conf ... b=download
[8] http://www.otrs.com/en/software/otrs-he ... e-add-ons/

[reneeb]

<Disclaimer>I'm one of those "third party" companies that make some money with OTRS development</Disclaimer>

I agree with you. The move to github makes it easier for all. There is a feeling that there were more features/bugfixes applied since the move to github than in three or four years before. And the OTRS people react faster on github pull requests than on patches in the bugtracker... That's a good move.

Until recently the community members that sent code for the project weren't honored. Christopher wrote "The absence of contributions is even more distressing as xxx’s investment in the OTRS project provided the commerical basis for several OTRS service providers." but xxx is mentioned in every single file, so everybody knows who wrote code. But it's distressing to contribute code which is also the commercial basis for xxx but being not mentioned anywhere.

Fortunately xxx merged one of my pull requests that makes it easy to generate an AUTHORS file for each release...

I proposed (on Christophers Facebook account) a meeting of xxx, third party vendors and community members. On such a meeting all the attendees could discuss how OTRS could be opened up. But no reaction yet

I think the connection between community and xxx was way better when Shawn was the Community Manager. I don't know if they still have a Community Manager.

[xhoy]

mm, I browsed the code a lot lately and saw some of your commits... I tough (but did know for sure do) that you worked at xxx

I don't think i would care if they would mention my name anywhere but I think xxx has the feeling they provide code for *everyone* but nobody pays. As mentioned I have the feeling lately there are many people that are willing to contribute and trying to do so.

About the community manager, i emailed shawn december 2012 about the topic in #otrs on freenode... he forwarded it to the current channel admin... the topic hasn't changed since august 2011

So something I thought about today:

There shouldn't be a community manager since OTRS is a community so on all levels there should be 'interactions' with the community. The codes should do their fair share in helping /reviewing.
A meeting sounds good, but Germany could be a bit far for some people!
Maybe OTRS could give frequent contributors access to ‘private’ code or feature-add-ons or something. This would make sense since I could trade some fixes I made for feature A for feature B
The most important thing would be that they start interacting with the community and open up instead of closing down and moving away from the community.

And no I don’t have any clue on how to run a community and I know it’s easier said than done but at the moment I don’t feel welcome!

[crythias]

Please feel welcome here :)

[xhoy]

Please feel welcome here

Hahaha Thanks!

I must say I do get their point, but I think they are overacting a bit. Their ideas a good but they need to be a little bit more patience

[reneeb]

mm, I browsed the code a lot lately and saw some of your commits... I tough (but did know for sure do) that you worked at xxx

I worked there as a freelancer for two years... That's why I know that there are really smart people and why I'm really sad about latest moves.

I don't think i would care if they would mention my name anywhere but I think xxx has the feeling they provide code for *everyone* but nobody pays. As mentioned I have the feeling lately there are many people that are willing to contribute and trying to do so.

When Christopher emphasizes how much effort they put into OTRS, then they should mention the other contributors, too.

There shouldn't be a community manager since OTRS is a community so on all levels there should be 'interactions' with the community. The codes should do their fair share in helping /reviewing.

A community manager (an active one) would be a great start.

A meeting sounds good, but Germany could be a bit far for some people!

Every place on earth is too far for someone. I proposed Germany as xxx's headquarter is in Germany and most third party vendors I know are located in Germany, too. But I would also travel (if it's not too far away ). Unfortunately xxx stopped all their efforts regarding conferences, trades, etc. It would be great to meet them at OS events like FOSDEM, FrOSCon, OSCON, etc...

The most important thing would be that they start interacting with the community and open up instead of closing down and moving away from the community.

[/quote][/quote]100% ACK

[xhoy]

Oke, today i was reading on the pfsense form (an opensource project aswell). They had a bounty program.

Maby OTRS should try to encourage some bounty program that way it everybody would benevent! maby they could link this whit the ideascale tool?

PS: here is how they do it: http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/board,34.0.html rather easy!

[reneeb]

I proposed a Grant and a Bounty program to Manuel three years ago. I know those programs from the Perl community (where I am a Grant Manager of the Perl Foundation).

And I would support an application for the Google Summer of Code (that should be run as a "cooperation" of OtterHub and xxx so that OtterHub could get the money from Google). But that's something that needs xxx's agreement as they have to merge the code and they have to support such an application in regards of "spreading the word".

There is so much where OTRS could benefit from the Open Source world (and vice versa), but all proposals that I sent were warnocked. The same was for OPAR, but that was something I was able to do on my own...

Those topics are something a community manager can work on as that needs a lot of communication between xxx and the community.

Edit: For clarification: Grants are usually bigger than Bounties. The Perl Foundation gives Grants worth of 500-3000 USD (and some grants of special funds with an amount of up to 25000 USD). Bounty programs in the Perl world had up to 500 USD... And Grants need a formal application and Bounties are offered by the vendor (e.g. a list of Bugs to be worked on)