dotProject

dp3 development proceeded apace whilst we were able to pay one of our developers a wage. Unfortunately that doesn't last forever, and whilst the sponsorship amount was unbelievably generous, eventually a full-time job was required.

Most of the day jobs are currently extremely busy. Perhaps you will have noticed that there's a massive economic squeeze on at the moment - and many people are, understandably, concentrating on ensuring that they do a good job for their employers, to keep the various businesses functioning (and their own jobs alive). dotProject admins "get that" even if a small part of the user community are leaping in for their regular "dotProject is dead" arc up.

In general terms of where we're going as per:

http://docs.dotproject.net/index.php?title=Status_Information

We've always envisaged that we'd have a functionality roll out of

3.x - Resource Managemet
4.0 - Project Budgeting
5.0 - Project Reporting & Risk Management
6.0 - Collaborative Elements & Workflow

We have got some general points sorted out against each of these elements (the current point form list of 3.x elements is on the documentation site) and one day, time allowing, we'll put up some more elements, but really there's no point until we get closer to actually being able to work on them.

//admin rambling on//
dotProject is really a labour of love. An itch we scratch sometimes. We actually got involved years and years ago because it was a product that we needed in house, and it has done a phenomenal job at supporting that function since that date.

Sure there's a lot that could be done to continue growth of the product - and we've got a lot of plans for where we go with it. Having said that, the current dp3 / Zend conversion is going to take a lot of time. Period.

But ultimately, the problem that we've always got is time. And I don't know how many times I have to remind people of this but we don't have a lot of time at the moment, and people having a go at us for what is a reality that we can't do anything about, is about as counter-productive an act as you can possibly do.

We understand fully that people might find the wait problematic and we really hope that they find an alternative product that suits them. But ultimately, dotProject isn't a commercial product, we don't have a commercial imperative - we can't, it simply doesn't provide us with any way that we can eat and work at the same time.

We are also aware that there have been (yet again) a couple of offers to "put a couple of our programmers on the job and give the code to you". We're extremely wary of that approach, and ultimately the question has to be asked - what's in that for us? At best we end up as maintenance programmers for other peoples code, at worst we end up with too many code submissions that skew the project's direction and we run the risk of losing the project focus. (We've tried it in the past and that's exactly what ended up happening). Nobody has yet been able to put a case to us that doesn't end up with either proposition to the fore.

And finally there's the question of our own motivation.

Why do you think we're here?

Why do you think we spend so many of our early mornings and evenings on the support forums, answering questions for people?

Why do you think we do bug fixes, and now spend upwards of 60 hours a release testing?

Why do you think we work on dotProject?

What do you think makes us come back?

//admin rambling off//