Niclas Hedhman wrote:
> The goal initially was to highlight that "The Apache Way"
> speaks highly of the positive sides of meritocracy, but
> ignores any possible 'misuse' of the system.
Actually, I believe that this speaks quite to the opposite of ignoring abuse
of the system, as you put it. And it emphasizes that meritocracy is not
just about technical merit, but about community.
> I think it is important for the ASF to remain long-term viable,
> [that] there is a reasonable guideline of what constitutes "abuse",
> "misconduct" and "matter of demotions". Tolerance is relative,
> and the more people you bring together, the greater the risk that
> conflicts will occur and these types of resolutions will be called
> upon.
Perhaps, but situations such as this have been incredibly rare to the point
of being unique, despite our having approximately 1000 committers now, and
almost a decade of history.
You make it sound as if the Board was off on a lark, when the fact is that
the situation has all too often discussed in many circles, and the Board has
been fairly closely monitoring the project for more than two years. Nor
should it have come as a surprise to the person whose identity should have
been protected, since he has been made aware of concerns often and
privately.
> I am getting the feeling that this is a touchy subject and
> should not be discussed in open.
If you wanted to talk about long-term viability, concerns about abuse,
misconduct, solutions, checks and balances, etc., you should have done so in
a manner divorced from the specific situation and certainly from the
specific individual. If that individual told you that you could go ahead,
that's better, but you should still have discussed it with the author of the
e-mail.
> Possibly 50% or more of the current Avalon codebase is
> written by him, and he is not allowed to work as a
> committer in Avalon.
Well, the latter is a decision for the PMC to make. To suggest that the
Board imposed that as a restriction, when it specifically said otherwise is
disingenuous.
> Being 'kicked out' of your own work is a big thing that I think
> most active committers would like to know more about. No?
So what matters? Who contributes the work? Or the community?
The ASF is all about community. No matter how good one person's technical
skills may be, nor how good the code, if we cannot build a strong developer
community around it, then this is the wrong place for it. The ASF is built
for the long-term.
In my opinion, projects that like to churn compatibility on a regular basis
in search of new features are possibly not philosophically in tune with what
most in the ASF would believe. Consider that the Apache HTTP Server project
still maintains v 1.3 ... how many years after v2? This is something that
I don't believe everyone gets, which is unfortunate, especially for a genre
of project where stability is paramount, such as as platform.
Merlin could have been Avalon Container v2, but that doesn't mean you stop
supporting Avalon Container v1. And there had been a consensus on a
direction that would support future development and support existing users.
But instead, a number of developers began to adopt the position that it was
necessary to kill off the past in order to promote the future.
The new work is excellent, and there is a small community of developers who
are devoted to it, but in terms of cost to the community, don't disregard
the facts. Following their muse, they co-opted the project; determined that
the one important piece of the consensus was a unified platform, without
regard for the rest of the consensus; and actively and openly spoke of both
developer AND USER attrition as a means for achieving the goal. It got to
the point where the bulk of committers walked out, although some eventually
came back to form the core of the Excalibur project. So when I see a
comment that "all of the active committers" are committed to one platform, I
almost have to laugh. Almost everyone else had departed in anger and
frustration.
--- Noel
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