Comments on: What Will Make Your Project Successful?

By: John

John — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 23:30:41 +0000

I think its impractical to include more than you need to fulfill your intentions for the program.
Also, I think Tcl/Tk is a good example to what you said about “both easy to use and is technically strong.” It is very easy as a language, as I have used it more than even C. And yet it gets closer to being as pretty as GTK or other languages.
I should probably find out how they do it so well next time I want to do an open source project.

By: sims

sims — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 09:21:41 +0000

Yup, but that\’s pretty common sense – unless your like the nth open source CMS. That\’s something I absolutely cannot understand. Why do people praise the bazaar dev style so much. I\’m working on an open source project, but I don\’t want just anybody messing with the code base. That would ruin it. I\’ve seen to much poor code and I don\’t want it entering my code base. When the software is fleshed out, then others can contribute to a well laid out code base. Or they can contribute patches and I will rewrite or modify them to fit nicely. I just don\’t see any value in the huge user base BS.

By: Anthony

Anthony — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 06:54:23 +0000

I gotta agree with both of those myths. Especially the “features” myth. It’s amazing how people will buy software based on checklists without caring how it works.

We went with opentaps because it was easy. We wanted someone open source and I remember employees seeing the options and saying “please let’s use opentaps.” I wasn’t sure if it was the right move at the time, but having an ERP that’s simple for your employees to use is a major advantage. I can’t imagine running an operation using anything else. The whole point of software is to remove complexity. I don’t see how you can use software to eliminate complexity if your employees can’t figure out how to use the software.

Unfortunately, bad UI is mainstream in ERP world. Opentaps is really at the forefront of ERP in this regard.