Plea for Open Source Development in the QlikView World

To be honest, I’m a little bit frustrated when talking about open-source development for QlikView. For quite some time I am trying to share as much content as possible and the response/feedback is little.

For a long time I was thinking that maybe I am just developing solutions which are not used/needed by customers and partners, but the last months have shown me that the reality is different:

• I – quite often – see my solutions (posted on this blog and on CodePlex and GitHub) in real world scenarios
• And furthermore my prototypes are taken and improved, but I never receive any feedback. That would be OK, but I would really expect that at least some customers or partners post their improvements by applying patches or improvements to CodePlex or GitHub … Unfortunately this has only happened once – today.

Can you imagine why there is no real open-source culture in the entire QlikView community?

Sure QlikCommunity is great and a lot of code-samples are posted there, but you can rarely find ready-to-go open-source solutions out there and furthermore I really miss these projects where many developers are working on the same code, inspiring each other – I only know a few QlikView related open-source initiatives:

• Rob Wunderlich has initated the QlikView Compenents project
• Rikard Braathen has published some very useful solutions on GitHub, like for example the qv-user-manager and the qv-affinity-configurator
• Brian Munz has recently announced that he will put some solutions on GitHub, for example the svgReader-Extension for QlikView 11
• Ralf Becher has published some content on GitHub including some QlikView related Gists
• Thomas Friebel – a QlikTech colleague in DACH – also started to publish some extensions on GitHub
• And there is me on CodePlex and GitHub

Are there other project out there which I do not know?
If you have a look at all the projects mentioned above there is little or no contribution by other developers beside the author (except the QlikView Components project).

Wouldn’t it be nice, if …

• … there were a lot more open-source projects out there with a vital community of QlikView developers?
• … some discussions on QlikCommunity result in useful code-pieces posted as Gists (or similar formats)?
• … you were able to use the resulting solutions in your daily life as a QlikView user/developer/consultant?
• … we were able to bring our know-how together to create astonishing solutions
• … we do not need to re-invent the wheel in many cases?

My Contribution

I can only talk for myself and how I am planning to improve the situation in the future:

• I am planing to move all my content from CodePlex to GitHub because GitHub seems to support participation of other developers much better.
• I am going to upload all my prototypes on GitHub, not only projects which are ready-to-use but also alpha versions of several prototypes.
• I will be happy to receive code-requests, patches and so on and integrate them into the main-line of my solutions.

Hmmm, really looking forward to reading your ideas and opinions regarding open-source development in the QlikView world.