[Essentialdata-discuss] Essential Data Future

[David J. O. <dj...@co...>]

All,

There sometimes comes a time in the life of a project when the leader of 
that project needs to step down for the good of everyone.  I lived, ate, 
and breathed Essential Data for something like a year up until my job 
change, so this is obviously not an easy step to take.

Unfortunately, ASC continues to prevent me from working on Essential 
Data in any capacity by threatening my current employer with a lawsuit 
under the non-compete clause of my employment agreement.  This despite 
the fact that they would actually benefit from my supporting the project 
for them on a pro bono basis while they go looking for a buyer.  
(Obviously, I can't say what steps db4objects has taken to try to remedy 
the situation, but your imaginations are probably pretty close to 
accurate...)

The result is that the Essential Data community needs to best figure out 
how to support itself (without me, and also apparently without ASC) and 
then make that happen.

The issues as I see them are:

0) The community needs to figure out its strategic direction.

Around Eclipse-land, there are two data binding frameworks: Eclipse's 
JFace and Essential Data.  Since I am not permitted to work with 
Essential Data, I will personally be working with Eclipse's JFace 
framework.  (Just to be clear, in case someone from ASC or one of their 
lawyers reads this, my decision is not to abandon Essential Data since I 
don't have a code base to support, but rather just to go where I have no 
choice but to go, given my current legal options.)

The community here has an existing code base.  You can either maintain 
your projects on this code base or you can port them to JFace.  Both are 
possible, but it will likely require the work of the entire community to 
either make JFace easy to port to or to maintain Essential Data.  And if 
the choice to port to JFace is made, any additions to JFace designed to 
make the job easier must be written from scratch, preferably with a 
different design from Essential Data so as not to introduce *any* GPL 
code into JFace.

If possible, I would recommend that the community decide either if it 
wants to maintain Essential Data as it is or to port over to JFace.  
Then there will be the maximum number of people available for either job 
than if each individual/company went their own way.

** If the community wants to stay with Essential Data, then the 
following are true:

1) There needs to be a maintainer for the project: someone to accept 
patches and who is responsible for the ongoing quality of the work.

If anyone steps forward and wants the maintainer role for the 
SourceForge project, I will give that to whoever asks, subject to 
approval by the community.

2) People need support.  I've gotten several emails over the past weeks 
from very nice people asking for support.  I wish I were in a position 
to help, but I don't think anyone will fault me for not wanting to risk 
my current job by offering any kind of support.

My encouragement to the community is that you guys are on the right 
track in figuring out how Essential Data works and how best to utilize 
it.  Several questions have gone without resolution recently.  But I'll 
encourage you guys to keep looking: the answers *are* there... 

If there were interest, it would be cool if someone could start a Wiki 
or a weblog where they shared usage tips with the rest of the community.

3) People need documentation.

I noticed today that ASC put the documentation Wiki back up.  I also 
notice that all of the Wiki (including all of the documentation) is 
licensed under an open-source Creative Commons license...


** I won't say what needs to happen if you guys decide to make it easy 
to port to JFace--I don't want to be accused by my former employer of 
telling you guys to abandon Essential Data.  But you guys are some of 
the smartest programmers I've met; I think you can figure out what to do 
for yourselves if you choose this route.  :-)


Let me know how I can best (and legally) support you guys, which boils 
down to, if you think I have something I can legally give any of you and 
you want it, please let me know.


Best regards,

Dave Orme

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