The PHPEdit Group is happy to announce the launch of the PHPEdit Community – http://community.phpedit.net/ – a new site designed to encourage closer collaboration between PHPEdit’s users and developers. The primary reason for introducing this system is to resolve some very familiar conflicts:
You want features that help you be more productive and you want to use an open source tool, we want to develop those features but we’ve reached our limit point for free-time work, so the PHPEdit Community will offer us to work more efficiently and provide a new way of funding our work.
These are the benefits offered by the PHPEdit Community:
Improved Issue priority management: With the new PHPEdit Community interface, you can report issues as previously with the bug tracker. And now you can vote for the issues which look more important to you. This way we will know what is the most important for users and will be able to process these issues first.
Central Issue location: Before the introduction of the PHPEdit Community, there were several places to search for bugs, features request and the like. Now every issue will be centralized in a single interface.
Improved stable release frequency: With the PHPEdit Community, it will be easier for us to process bugs reports and to release stable versions more often.
New way of supporting the development: We have always encouraged you to submit your ideas on how to improve the IDE and related tools, but unfortunately we have not had the resources to build all of your suggested new features. With the PHPEdit Community, the cost of developing a new feature can be shared by large groups of users that want the new feature. This means that groups of you that want the same new feature can share the cost of its development by each contributing a small fee, and means that we can afford to build the features that you want and keep PHPEdit open source.
For example, imagine that the development cost of the feature list you want is 2,000. A single user is unlikely to be willing to pay the total development cost, but might be willing to share the cost another 99 users (ie. 20 each). The new PHPEdit Community supports this type of collaboration. The system allows lots of users to share the total cost. You can see a detailed explanation of the concept here.
Note, that all new development that is done in this way will continue to be available to all users. We will NOT restrict access to only those users that contributed towards the development cost. Our goal is to enable groups of you to share the cost of funding new features, and in doing so ensure that PHPEdit continues to be developed and benefits the whole PHPEdit user community. Keep in mind that 100 x 20 = 2,000, but 100 x 0 = 0, so the more of you that contribute to wards a new feature, the smaller the fee each has to pay.
This new system won’t change the actual way of distribution of the IDE. PHPEdit is Open Source and will remain as such. You are free to access its source code (see PHPEdit license) and are free to use it without requiring any license cost. Despite this, if everyone cooperates within the PHPEdit Community by sponsoring features and changes they find important for themselves, we can reach the sky together and provide everyone with the IDE of their dreams as cheaply as possible.
You can see and link to this document online at: http://www.phpedit.net/news/2003-06-09-PHPEditCommunity.php
Regards,
Sebastien Hordeaux
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PHPEdit Network: http://www.phpedit.net/
