I see two main interesting points:
* documentation & forum
I understand that documentation should be accessible offline, especially because our site is slow… we will try to find time to address this point soon. Put documentation in svn is more difficult (it’s a lot more work), but what we try to encourage is to put comments when a page has a problem, then we integrate the “patch” ourself. If you submit good things often, we can also provide you rights to contribute directly to the documentation. But maybe this process is still not a good solution for you? Concerning the forum vs mailing list, we will also try to allow the use of a mailing list synchronized with the forum. We investigated this area before without success, but drupal has evolved since then.

* lack of openness
You’re right, Ivy is not a totally open project in the sense that decisions are not transparent, and it is leaded by a commercial company. But it’s that commercial company, with only 4 co founders who have often difficulties to get paid, who decided to make part of its work accessible freely with the sources and a very open license. So I guess you can understand that this small company tries to make some benefit of this donation: get some visits on our web site, sell some service, keep the lead over the product, and yes get some donation to improve the product and its documentation…

So thanks again for your comments, we’ll do our best to make Ivy better than it is!

Concerning the scalability of Ivy, as you already answered, it is a non-issue. There’s no point in having a repository loaded with invalid content and descriptors such as the one from Maven.

The Ivy documentation being totally unacessible in its raw form make it impossible to fix. Stick that into svn and that will be a start to actually report, fix and contribute docs for anyone. That will also allow to actually get the docs on your computer, pretty useful if your site is going berserk, the internet connection is down, or you are in a train or a plane.

If you want to go into the donation thing and even joke about it, then make it truly obvious that is independant rather than under a blatant corporate umbrella. Otherwise it basically sends the message to potential contributors that they are working for free while there is a commercial entity behind…this cannot give any good feeling.

forums vs mailing list is basically visiting a list of websites everyday vs rss subscriptions. If you have a very slow site, your users are basically losing an absurd amount of time just browsing over the message so time vs information is far from mailing list or usenet. Why don’t you get hosted by sourceforge, codehaus, tigris, etc.. ? They provide a whole infrastructure for a project, it’s not 100% perfect, but it is more than you can offer already.

Concerning the bug/patches/etc.. I created quite a few issues a few months ago so I know it for sure that you are responsive, so I don’t quite get why you feel necessary to underline this point.

I feel like you may miss an important point regarding opensource projects and the importance of a community and how you actually create one. Resources need to be easily accessible. Decisions need to be transparents. Everybody must feel involved. Particulary when the project is leaded by a company. Otherwise the project will hardly get any traction, no matter how cool and revolutionary (and no matter if it is french.

Please do make your documentation available on svn ! It must be part of the project !

Concerning the mistakes quoted, I strongly agree with the lack of comments in the code, but most users don’t need to investigate in it. Documentation is not good in all areas (we should have more tutorials and examples), I agree, but most users don’t complain about its outdateness… maybe you could quote some areas where doc is outdated? And considering site slowness, you know it’s difficult to maintain an open source tool without ANY support. So please be kind with our small infrastructure, or give some money to help us provide a better performing site

Using a forum is mainly a matter of taste, we prefer forums, some prefer mailing lists, we don’t consider that as a mistake…

Development is not truly open… I don’t see why, except for the problem of comments in code and technical documentation, if you submit a patch we often integrate it quickly, and if you submit often we can consider giving you commit rights (we just welcomed maarten coene in the ivy committer list).

Features over features without documentation… Every released feature is documented in the reference documentation, if something is missing please tell us where, we really want to improve it.

That’s all for me, thanks for your comments and for trying ivy!