Redmine

I was about asking the same question.
Does the project shoot itself in the foot ?

I am also surprised about the lack of information why he thinks that was necessary. It is really disturbing news is a core developing is stepping down.

http://theadmin.org/articles/2010/11/26/stepping-down-from-redmine/

This comment explains why I'm not publishing what happened in the conflict.

http://theadmin.org/articles/2010/11/26/stepping-down-from-redmine/#comment-103672063

Eric Davis

My problem here with Redmine, which we have been using since summer 2008, and it has worked OK, no major problems.
But when I think about this, actually there has been no new major functionality, and no directives about what is to come in future versions.
The most major thing in the future I can see comming is "Gannt Chart rewrite" and since this would be non-interactive I wouldn´t call it major anyway just a tweak
A real major Issue is "Private issues" but this has been labelled "Unknown" So this is irrelevant.

Visions are missing.

When I look in the 2547 issues, a number which is totally gross and makes one loose the overview - I think I have suggested before to make a Voting page, so that issues that are important for the community would be prioritized, then the management would gain from the enormous braintrust that the community holds. This is not the case today.
A solution could be deleting all the 2547 issues and start from the beginning.

I think that the size of this program and it complexity has reached its limit. A solution could be to make it commercial

And the owner of the project, should step up to the plate and try to explain the plan with redmine.
Staying in silence, surely will not satisfy the community, which recommends Redmine to many people. Thats cheap and free marketing.

Just my 5 cents

/Lars

Well, if I can add my 2 cents, trying to hide dirty things in a project is the best way to kill it.
I think almost everybody had read Eric's blog about stepping down, but now we want the "other parties" to get some balls and explain wtf is going on.

Lars: One could use http://www.redmine.org/boards/3/topics/5506 or something like http://uservoice.com/

For what it's worth, I don't see it as a biggie that a core dev steps down. Of course that will happen from time to time, and the reasons will be different each time. Eric will continue to develop his plugins and offer his commercial services, and for me, that's probably even better since his plugins are really great.

Regarding vision etc, I think a lot of us want different things but for now, maybe we could just use the forums to discuss? If you have something specific you'd like to see, why not start a discussion about it?

And yes, the issue tracker here on redmine.org needs some help, somehow :) I don't see how making it commercial would change things to the better though, given how Redmine imho is better than all the commercial offerings out there (for me). The way Eric works seems almost perfect imho. Do paid for work for clients, and bring it back to the community / redmine when appropriate.

I agree with Stephan that making Redmine commercial will not help.
The success of the project comes from his ability to add features quickly. From my own experience, I left Trac for Redmine because the latest was offering all I needed without the need to add thousands of plug-ins (ok not thousands but feel like).

That said, I noticed like a slowdown since some time and the stepping down of Eric (and maybe others) is for me an alert that something is going wrong with the project.
If dirty things are not cleaned quickly it could be the end of a such beautiful project and/or the start of forks.

Damien,
You write "The success of the project comes from his ability to add features quickly" indeed you are right here, but I know that features/stuff take time.
And here I assume that since this is a "free program" that the main programmers all earn their daily bread in another company, thus Redmine is diminished to a spare time project.

Lars: Well, that's not true is it? Or well, as far as I understood, Eric makes his living from Redmine development, so to speak. Sometimes it comes back to the community (yay!) and sometimes it does not.

Lars, you don't need to explain to me the difficulties of working on an opensource project.
I have myself contributed to a handful of them and even founded some myself. And now i got two children so I don't think I need to say that my spare time is almost inexistent ;-)

What I mean is that Redmine is becoming a large project now and that if the development can't fix organizational problems now then they will never be able to grow. And I know by experience that internal wars in a project are deadly for it.

Seriously though, WTF!?

I've been using Redmine for two years and it's been great. However, nothing has changed, as previously stated 'where is the vision' to make this even better -- especially in design. The UI is tired and the UX is confusing at times. I was super excited to see Eric building a new UI/X with shaneandpeter, I've used the demo and it's AWESOME, why is it not the default after almost a year of it being complete?

We had the conversation in the forums and it seemed to me the --community-- loved it as much as I did. So, like I've said before WTF?

I'm all for an imbevolent dictator guiding open source projects, Matt does a great job at WordPress and there are a ton of others, the key is communication. The problem here, as I see it, communication about 'vision' or a mission is non-existent, it leads me to conclude through past decisions ( by not allowing change ) the vision is to change nothing and not give the community it's say.

Passive aggressive open source dictator?

For what it's worth, anyone can join in and try to help to bring the "vision" to the project, right? :)

Compared to other issue trackers, I really don't have any issues with the UI (when using a nice theme). Though there are some directions I wish it would go, of course, but I think almost all the alternatives are worse so I'd say Redmine is doing fairly good :)

From the issue trackers / project managing softwares I've looked at, only Fogbugz comes close. And that is an expensive system.

There is a lot of things that can be done on the UI using CSS.

IMHO, Redmine is great for small project. But when you are more organized with a support team, many dev team then it becomes less usable.
For example, you can automatically assign issues for a tracker to one person but not to a group. When the project is large it's something that is missing as one people can hardly do anything else than dispatching issues.

Another example, is that many issues need the same information and often you have to ask for the missing bits. If there was the feature that could permit to put template of issues on specific tracker, this would avoid such problems by establishing the mandatory and optional data needed in the issue.

Good products are made from good and useful features.

Its true that community-driven projects that get into internal battles do not progress well, and while we can only speculate on what has happened (and probably imagine the very worst cases) its still not a good situation to be in.

I love redmine, and I love that it is actively developed - looking at the roadmap there is a lot of good stuff that is being fixed and improved all the time. Releases are coming regularly and that's a good thing. It appears organised and I always had high expectations for the future.

Now that might be in jeopardy if this internal conflict shows an underlying problem that might give rise to similar issues in the future. We can only expect less development, fewer patches being accepted, possibly a fork, or worse - some other project rising to take Redmine's place as the #1 project management web tool.

So, I'd like to ask Eric to tell us what happened, I'd like Jean-Philipe to issue a note that explains his vision for the future of RM, and perhaps I'd like to see a slightly more formal project governance. I see this with other well-run projects, for example Subversion where the founders now take a less active role in development but provide much more vision, direction and leadership (and code if they feel like it).

Whatever happens, this issue needs to be resolved and explained. Ignoring it does a huge disservice to the community behind redmine.

Just a FYI, but Redmine has already forked.

great - now I have to decide which one to go with. (just like Hudson/Jenkins, it appears this is the season to go forking!)

got to say, I don't think much of 'chiliproject' as a name, but thanks for the info - I'll keep my eye on it.