Forum OpenACS Development: Response to please explain the decentralization of reuseable info in openacs (such as home address, business address, etc.)

Explaining the thinking would be difficult since the there was none (or not a lot). The ecommerce system was written in the early days of the acs and was ported to work with openacs4.x so there are a lot of either duplicated or poorly related data. I am not sure but I think the ybos events module was a 3.x port as well. Certain parts of the of the data model are quite well thought (kernel, content repository, etc) out but you need to recognize that a lot of parts were written at different times and hence don't quite gel they way they should.

Ideally we would rationalize a lot of these and remove the crufty bits but to date no one has stepped forward to do it.