My two cents.

[cbuck]

Hi. I am Chris. I lurk here mostly, looking for answers to some of my questions. More so, I am just interested with the goings ons around the MOS community. I am not known to anyone, and have only conversed with maybe three other MOS mambers in my life time. I have been using Mambo for a couple of years now on maybe as many as 20 commercial projects. I like it and find the product very good, and the members of the community especially helpfull, which makes this post a little difficult.

Selling the idea of an open source project to a client is a rather risky thing to do, and sometimes, if your client is learned in such things, a rather difficult sale. So, you tell them about the strong corps of developers and the huge amount of component developers in the community. Anyway, long story short:

I had a customer come by the forums and spend some time here last week. Needless to say I was a bit embarrassed when he mentioned the adolensence in the forums, complaining about this person and that person, the lending of unrequested advice. Basically, it went like this: My EX-client decided to go another way because he felt that the people that are envolved in the MOS project are not professional enough to help his business.

Mind you, I am not losing any money on this deal, but it did get me thinking. So, since everyone else is complaining about certain people, I will take my time to complain about all of us... Here goes.

Remember! We, (and I use that term specifically,) WE... have a certain resposibility to this community. Everyone is a representitive of the MOS community. Everytime we put up a site, everytime we post a thread. We all do our part... Most of what goes on in the software business and 99% of the web is marketing. Would you buy into a company that you didn't find to be 100% on focus? I think not. Why should we ask our customers to do anything less? I don't know about the rest of you, but my clients are becoming more and more online savvy. They will not settle for less.

I am embarrassed at the way some of us behave here. There is always whining about 100's of things that do not matter to the community and frankly should be handled in a closed forum.

I am here for one thing only, to help give my customers the BEST solution. Mostly, I can turn to this community to garner custom components and modules, and a friendly answer to a problem. Giving my customer Mambo in turn gives more support to the MOS community, because I help create a marketplace for this product. We ALL help create the market. With out that, there is no product, and most importantly no us.

So, my advice to all is this: Less Soap Opera, More Coding.

I guess I am finished. This may make no sense in the morning, sorry. I think this is important.

[SvenErik]

First, I have to agree with you that there are a few who act a little juvenile and stupid, sometimes... And some can be "excused" since they are juveniles. There are MOS users in all the age groups, so a difference in maturity and behavior would be expected. This is also a worldwide community with users from many countries and languages, and our knowledge in English varies a lot; and because of that, a lot of misunderstanding of someone’s intentions and meaning can arise.

But most important is that Mambers.com is a community place, not a corporate support site and the language and behavior of people here reflect that!

I would think it would be more beneficial for you to show your customers the official Mambo forum on mamboserver.com. There are some of the core developers who hang out here on Mambers, but the only place to find them all is on MamboServer. And the level of "soap opera" has been reduced a lot there since Robert, the MOS team leader, restricted the posting rules there a while back and because Mambers have taken over a lot of that.

And most of the people involved with MOS is doing it on a volunteer, non-profit level and is not interested in the commercial use of Mambo. Especially since the community and Mambo really doesn't benefit much from such commercial use except in the few cases where the commercial users of MOS donate money back to the MOS project, or pay for custom components that they allow to be published under the GNU license, usually a few months after the buyer has received the component.

This is Open Source, and the rules of the commercial world don’t apply here.

And since you obviously benefit from Mambo and its community on a commercial level and wants its community to behave in a certain way so you could benefit more, how does Mambo and the community benefits from you and your commercial use of Mambo? I can see that you don’t post here often since this was your sixth posting here, so you obviously don’t give back much advice and let the community benefit from all the experience you must have acquired in the couple of years you have used Mambo. Since you get an income from Mambo, do you donate any of that back to the continued development of Mambo as other commercial users and developers, and also non-profit users and end-users of Mambo do?

As I said, this is Open Source and the main rules are:

• If you got a scratch, scratch it!
• If you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours!

So once again, how does Mambo and the community benefit from your commercial use? And if it/we doesn’t benefit, why should we change our behavior to accommodate you?

[novocaine]

IMHO SvenErik's post absolutely hits the bull's eye. Actually I've got nothing more to add, except expressing my appreciation of SvenErik's post!

Thanks again,
novocaine

[visualdensity]

Well... no argument here.

[cbuck]

It was just an observation. Sorry if I offended, it wasn't my intention. It was mearly to motivate certain people and was in no way meant as a flame to the developers. My appologies.

Chris.

[alwarren]

Originally Posted by cbuck

Less Soap Opera, More Coding.

This is a "community" site open to all forms of discussion, rants, and raves. It has had a ton of soap opera of late. Most have no idea the amount of drama that goes on. That's one of the reasons I resigned as moderator.

For the best support, you really should send your customers to the official mamboserver forum.