Introducing ChiliProject – A community fork of Redmine
blog.chiliproject.orgCool, I guess?
It would be good to know what some of these new features will be and why I (as a redmine user) should care.
Yeah, I kind of get the feeling that there are probably reasons for the fork that aren't stated on in the blog post.
After a quick look around, here is the "why" behind the "what":
https://www.chiliproject.org/projects/chiliproject/wiki/Why_...
Reasons for using ChiliProject instead of Redmine:
https://www.chiliproject.org/projects/chiliproject/wiki/FAQ
It appears that the driving factor was one of centralization vs decentralization. Some of the developers wanted more openness with regard to contribution.
I get the impression we aren't being told the whole story
It's a bit strange yes. I don't know about the other "founders" (founders? come on, its a fork) but there was some drama between Eric and the main developer of redmine and checking the activity log he is the one who has started chiliproject.
Eric has written a lot about redmine and does consultancy about it so I guess that after investing so much on redmine, the only option left for him was to fork it.
I've been planning on offering redmine as Saas for a while at http://redmined.com (yeah, there's a lot of people doing the same already, I know) but maybe I'll move to chiliproject if the fork goes well.
Although it appears to be forking season at the moment, such a bold move as a fork doesn't happen just out of thin air. Yes, there were disagreements between several Redmine contributors, but I think the time is not ripe yet to spread out every detail of the conflict.
It should be suffice to say that both projects are going to continue to co-exist and probably going to be rather similar for quite some time. We don't want any bad blood between us and we are going to try to work together towards our common goal. We on the ChiliProject side just feel that more open and engaging development process helps the product and is more fun for all participants.
When a core dev steps down from a project and forks, I see that action as a vote of no confidence in the current leadership.
While I certainly don't want to stir the pot, I do see a bit of irony in that a stated goal of ChiliProject is transparency but there isn't a lot of transparency on why the fork was created.
I fear bad blood will be inevitable as developers/users pick their sides. All that being said, I wish your project the best and I will be looking in from time to time to see if we might revaluate our issue tracker.
Transparency in development process isn't the same as transparency in interpersonal drama.. with OSS it is hard to draw a distinction between the two sometimes. I applaud the relative civility with which this fork is happening and I appreciate the fact that we arent focusing on the drama but rather on the options and opportunities that this split creates.
The primary goal of the fork is to open up the project to the community. That means we have a much more open governance and decision process and try to actually talk about what we do and have planned. That way, we want to have a faster and more focused development process. The short story of the fork is on the Why Fork? page: https://www.chiliproject.org/projects/chiliproject/wiki/Why_...
Feature-wise we try to make ChiliProject more modular and extensible by plugins and third-party tools (via the REST API). Also, we plan a deep UI/UX overhaul and having more flexible workflows and permissions. The exact roadmap is still to be defined (in an open community process), but I think you get an idea.
The first release will be compatible to Redmine 1.0.5, and we try to keep the migration path between Redmine and ChiliProject open as long as possible.
Clever name.