Re: [DotGNU]RDF based discovery system

[Norbert Bollow]

James Michael DuPont <address@hidden> wrote:

> The point is that a Discovery service for free software needs to be
> thought through carefully.

I'd like to start my response by proposing definitions for the terms
"discovery problem" and "offerings".

With "offering" I mean an XML description of something that is
obtainable and potentially desirable, for example a commercial
service, or a chunk of GPL'd code that is available for download,
or some other kind of information.

The "discovery problem" is to find, among many offerings, one or more
that will meet your needs.

I'm primarily interested in a discovery system that allows to
locate business services (not limited to webservices).  If the
same system also turns out to be useful for finding free software,
great.  However, if a proposed system has design limitations that
prevent it from doing everything that would be desirable in a
"discovery service for free software", that should not prevent
DotGNU from moving forward, as fast as reasonably possible, with
busilding a system that is useful for discovery of business
services.  DotGNU needs such a system in order to fulfil its
mission of being a successful competitor to the .NET threat.

On the other hand, I'm getting the impression that you're primarily
interested in a discovery system that allows to locate chunks of
code that may be suitable for re-use in other Free Software
projects.  That's a somewhat different type of discovery problem,
not necessarily more difficult than the discovery problem for
business services, but different and less well understood.  It would
certainly be nice to have a good solution to this problem in DotGNU,
but that's not among DotGNU's key objectives.

> As I said, it is my challenge to you and the other dotgnu people to
> deal with the question of openness and informationsharing.

My response to this challenge is that DotGNU makes, as far as that
is possible without this interfering with the project's primary
objectives, all information and decision-making processes publicly
visible.

However, my impression is that you're continually pushing for DotGNU
to include issues of some kinds of _automation_ of "openness and
informationsharing" among its primary objectives.  That is not going
to happen, because that's not part of the original DotGNU vision and
including it among the primary objectives would reduce our chances
of attaining the original objectives.

It's totally ok when these issues are part of your personal agenda,
and part of exprimental projects listed on the "Proposals" wiki page,
but I wonder whether you'd be willing to stop trying to push them
onto the list of core objectives of DotGNU, or into development
projects where the maintainer has already said "no"?

Warm greetings, Norbert.

-- 
Founder & Steering Committee member of http://gnu.org/projects/dotgnu/
Free Software Business Strategy Guide   --->  http://FreeStrategy.info
Norbert Bollow, Weidlistr.18, CH-8624 Gruet (near Zurich, Switzerland)
Tel +41 1 972 20 59        Fax +41 1 972 20 69       http://norbert.ch