[Development] Call for Volunteers: SSO-improvements for qt-project.org

[Jeff Mitchell]

On 12/07/2011 03:54 AM, Robin Burchell wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 9:22 AM,  <Craig.Scott at csiro.au> wrote:
>> Without entering into the "which is better" debate, Confluence can be used for free for open source projects
> 
> I'm not trying to be an alarmist, I do know that, and that is good.
> Props to Atlassian for offering that. I still don't like it. Just
> because it's free for use *now* doesn't mean that it will be
> indefinitely free for use. Trusting essential tooling to a company's
> goodwill isn't what I'd call a smart approach. Companies can go under,
> be sold, or change their minds very easily.

I know that a lot of open source projects will not use any non-FOSS (KDE
for instance), but my understanding was that Qt uses JIRA because
although proprietary, it's the best in its class, which makes it very
useful. Crowd is also being used, and is also proprietary.

It seems to me that the Qt project prefers software that helps get work
done efficiently over software that is necessarily FOSS (it's not alone
there; tons of projects, including Apache, do the same thing). In that
vein I think Confluence is a good choice, since it is both a
best-in-class wiki and would integrate well with the bug tracker and SSO
solution.

As for being a bit hasty to suggest this, my understanding is that the
choice of MediaWiki in the first place was overly hasty, as it was
chosen simply because it seemed the easiest to get set up very fast, not
because of any intrinsic merits. So I don't particularly think the fact
that someone is starting to help make it work better is a reason to
ignore the alternatives; if anything, it means the alternatives should
be discussed earlier, before they do a lot of work in that regard that
could end up being discarded.

Anyways, I guess we'll know more about DevNet soon, which may make all
of this moot.

FWIW, licenses to the Atlassian products come with access to the source
code, which might somewhat help ease fears about the company failing.

Alexandra: sorry if I misremembered your objections to MediaWiki, I
truly thought you said you didn't like it.  :-)

--Jeff