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Project killing, code throwing (over the wall) and cost, oh my!
I got some requests to make RavenMQ an OSS project. And I thought that I might explain the thinking behind why I don’t want to do that.
Put simply, I have never thrown a significant amount of code over the wall for other people to deal with. Oh, I have done it with a lot of small projects ( < ~2,000 LOC ) which I assume that most people can figure out in an hour or less, but a significant, non trivial amount of software? Never done that.
It doesn’t feel right. More than that, it isn’t likely to actually work. Even mature, multiple contributors projects have a hard time to do a leader shift, if they were structured as a single person effort. To do so on a brand new codebase which no one really knows? That is a recipe for either tying me up with support or creating a bad impression if someone doesn’t get the code to work. One of the things that I learned from many years of working with Open Source software is that the maturity level of the project counts, and that just throwing code over the wall is a pretty bad way of ensuring that a project will survive and thrive.
And then there is another issue, I don’t believe that RavenMQ is as valuable now that SignalR is out there. You can do pretty much whatever you could do with RavenMQ with SignalR, and that means that as far as everyone is concern, this is a pure win. There isn’t a need to create a separate project simply to have a separate project.
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Thing is, there will always be somebody complaining. If you create a new project, people come and say "Why didn't you use X instead?". If you use X and skip the "not invented here", people come and complain "why did you abandon Y?". As the buddhist say, the only way out of this is to not mangle with Karma, i.e. put yourself in a quiet corner and meditate.
Yet this is the type of thing we see being pushed as good and 'cost saving' practices in enterprises.
Upload a zip. What have you got to lose?
Good decision. If somebody wants to see how such stuff works, they can check out SignalR.
@Richard I think if you read the blog, he explains exactly what he's got to lose.
You should let the SignalR boys do a code review of RavenMQ :)
Whats the matter? Afraid someone will critique your code on their blog and call you a hopeless this and a stupid that? Hmm sounds familiar.
Deng, Do you realize just how much of my code is publicly available?
@Ayende, I think a good number of people who have been commenting on your blog lately have not actually read your blog. Or looked at your github profile for that matter.
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