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  3. April 2006

Re: Open Source RPG ?

David,
Not rambling. You are right on. The biggest hurdle is an assurance of quality and a community big enough to sustain the effort. On the quality issue, if IBM was invested enough in the project they would insure that quality was maintained (the Eclipse/WDSC project is a good example) and that goes beyond the "peer review" mechanism built in to most open source projects. On the community aspect, I have seen a few RPG open source projects that have gained enough viability to be at an active status but without the broader developer support necessary to have a "developer community" which is at the heart of most projects. The few "successful" RPG-based open source projects I am aware of are single developer offerings that may be used widely but don't have multiple contributors. And while that isn't a huge limiting factor, I just wonder why that is. Could it be that we are willing to use RPG open source project but not really ready to "participate". Or it could be that the RPG open source projects are just so good that no one has seen a need to contribute ;-)
Anyway, I am OT with this ramble but your points were well stated. What I'd like to see are more open source RPG offerings (you'll see only a few at www.opensource4iseries.com) and a larger community effort on open source in general.
Back to the naming of RPG: At the town hall meeting at Common it was suggested that we rename RPG, not open source it. I am not sure that a new name would breath any new life into the language but I know from experience that ready-made open source solutions CAN drive greater language adoption. I'd like to see that in the System i / RPG world as well. 

Pete Helgren

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