Future of LedgerSMB: Ideas and RFC

[Chris Travers <..hidden..>]

Hi all;

Many of you may be frustrated at the pace of development of LedgerSMB
and the fact that 1.3 has not yet been released.  Development may
appear to have slowed. Public discussions become less frequent...

For the last few years, LedgerSMB has achieved significant growth.
Some of that growth has come at an organizational cost and for that I
apologize to the community.  Now I have to try to help put the
organizational stuff back together.

In reality, far from being quiet, LedgerSMB 1.3 has had a huge amount
of commissioned work done on it, not only for the core system (where
the customer/vendor management, reconciliation, and payment interfaces
have been completely rewritten) but also in areas of addons for fixed
asset handling, template transactions, so forth.  We have eliminated a
lot of performance bottlenecks for larger databases, and provided a
much higher level of security than previous versions.  This has been a
 very ambitious project and we are much better off for it.

I would like to propose a few specific directional approaches and get
feedback from the community before proceeding.

I think the major priorities at this point need to be:
1)  Getting 1.3 out the door.
2)  Focusing heavily on community building
3)  Trying to build partnerships with other open source business
projects (perhaps GNU Med and others?)


To this end I would like to tentatively suggest the following:
The first is a regular beta release schedule for 1.3...  Maybe every
other Tuesday?

There are some committed fixes for 1.2 which have not made it into a
release.  I would like to release this as soon as possible.  However,
given the fact that bug reports have slowed, I think it is likely that
it is not likely that 1.2 will see another release absent developing
problems  like issues caused by new versions of Perl.

I'd also like to encourage anyone who is interested in contributing to
start looking heavily at 1.3.  This is a place where you can earn a
name in the CONTRIBUTORS file, or possibly even commit privileges.

But in addition I would like to see what the community thinks.  What
do you think we need to do to pull things back together and bring the
project to the next level?

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers