[doap-interest] DOAP and customers

[James Howison]

Seems to me that a customer relationship to a project is not well  
defined (Software customer, support customer, contract customer,  
source customer, re-distributer ....).

The range of types of commercial relationships is pretty large and a  
single word doesn't do much justice.  Moreover it isn't clear what the  
customer is getting (what the object for a putative doap:customer  
would be).

For example a Project can produce multiple pieces of software each of  
which might be the product. Perhaps it would help to think of parts of  
the doap vocabulary being products that a customer might purchase,  
then seeking a vocabulary better suited to describing the specific  
type of commercial relationship you are interested in.  I rather  
think, though, that you'll find that a Project is something that is  
part_of a Company, a Product is released by a Company, and a Customer  
is customerOf the Company, in some fashion.

--J



On Aug 14, 2008, at 7:05 AM, Erling Wegger Linde wrote:

> (I think somewhere this thread didn't continue on the doap-interest
> list, but only between the two of us)
>
> It would be great if anyone else would state their opinion on this.
>
> Even if not every project, or even the majority of open source
> projects don't need a "client" property, I still think it would
> benefit DOAP, as it could more easily be adopted in commercial
> projects.
>
> - Erling =)
>
> On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 9:54 AM, Stuart A. Yeates  
> <syeates at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 7:22 PM, Erling Wegger Linde <erlingwl at gmail.com 
>> > wrote:
>>> I mean the party that you relate to when you develop your  
>>> software. In
>>> Scrum it would be the Product Owner for instance. I think that is a
>>> very important role for a software project.
>>>
>>> To give you some context:
>>>
>>> We're developing an application where project information is stored
>>> using DOAP. We want a customer to be able to log in and see
>>> information for every project he is involved in, for instance mail
>>> adresses to developers, project managers etc. (and much much more).
>>> But somehow we need to link a customer to a project (so he cannot  
>>> see
>>> information about other projects, because such information can be
>>> sensitive/confidential), and it just feels weird that we could use
>>> maintainer, developer and the other properties to connect our own
>>> people to a project, but not the customers.
>>>
>>> So what I mean with customer, is the persons that can prioritize
>>> requirements, monitors the process etc. Maybe customer is not the  
>>> best
>>> term in English?
>>
>> Thank you for clarifying your meaning.
>>
>> Generally when you have an on-going customer for whom you're building
>> software the term in English would be "client"  (at least in my
>> experience). Unfortunately this term also has meanings in terms of
>> software architecture (i.e. client-server archiecture).
>>
>> I'm also not sure whether all/many open source projects have people  
>> in
>> this role. I'm aware that lots of developers of open source software
>> have people in this role, but I'm not sure how many projects do,
>> particularly under, for example, the ASF model of open source. While
>> not all uses of DOAP are in open source, most of them are, which is
>> probably why we don't have this role yet.
>>
>> Anyone else have thoughts?
>>
>> cheers
>> stuart
>>
>
>
>
> -- 
> Med vennlig hilsen
> Erling Wegger Linde
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