On Tuesday, October 29, 2002, at 10:29 PM, Ted Husted wrote:
10/29/2002 11:23:22 PM, Henri Yandell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:In terms of community fractures, I think the proposal to promote Jakarta projects out of Jakarta [something I'm not against] is the one that is a danger to the community. I think this is why that community was originally defensive and still hedgy.
I think most of the edginess is simply fear of the unknown. Many of the ASF Members, like Greg, have not had the opportunity to interact with the ASF Committers working at Jakarta. Likewise, nearly all of us working at Jakarta have only interacted with a handful of the ASF Members. For good or ill, many of the key management lists at other ASF Projects are restricted, making it difficult for us to learn by example. Happily, this list is starting to fill that gap by documenting some of the missing usuage examples. =:0)
I think the most of the edginess is ignorance or rejection of the known, coupled with the most pessimistic possible assumptions of anything that is unknown.
How many folks have read the foundation pages at http://www.apache.org/ before joining a project? The bylaws and public records of ASF? Read about other ASF projects? Learned what it is they're getting involved with? Googled a bit to find out how ASF interacts with the world? Or to see how and why other projects in the past have failed or succeeded?
Why would one expect people to read everything yet to be written down when it seems they have not read or want to read what is already written down?
I believe most of us are very eager to learn. Like many good developers, we are not eager to reinvent the wheel. Frameworks are a favorite topic at Jakarta, and I'm sure virtually all of us are ready, willing, and able to adopt the ASF framework. It's just most of us are still learning how the ASF architecture is suppose to work.
On the contrary, I see the wheel being reinvented right here, right now. See the subject of this email. I think that is because people either don't want to know, or know and wish to ignore anything that doesn't agree with how they think things should work.
Meanwhile, the Community at Jakarta is based on the interactions between its Committers, not on a political body or a URL. The Community of Committers that has arisen at Jakarta is not going to go away become some products "earn their stripe" and are promoted to top level projects. It's true that some people have developed a certain "brand" loyalty to Jakarta, but I think that loyalty will easily transfer back to Apache, as we learn more about what "being Apache" means.
The political body and URLs arose from the interactions between committers. Let's not forget that, or once again ignore it since we seem to want things to be written down for us.
Let's see how current committer groups run as PMCs. Wouldn't you agree that if they fail to govern themselves or their own projects successfully, they would not make effective governors of others? Let me be clear that I am not talking about generating code here.
I think there is clear evidence on this list that people are quite willing to go ahead and change things they know or care nothing about.
The community of committers that has arisen at Jakarta may choose not to be part of the greater community of ASF, as at last count at least some of them were among 80% of committers not on this list.
Why is it that the issue is framed as ASF needing to learn about Jakarta, instead of as Jakarta needing to learn about the rest of the world and its history? Is it possible to see that the perception may well be that the community of committers that has arisen at Jakarta wants to know about nothing other than itself?
Chuck
