Hello Sergio, Sergio Fernández <[email protected]> schrieb am Fr., 27. Mai 2016 um 11:44 Uhr:
> Hi all, > > once we got over the 0.2.0-incubating milestone, I think it's time to > meditate what's the future of Commons RDF... > > FMPOV it's clear that we're far away from where we wanted to be when we > started this journey of incubation. Many reasons to explain why: the > incubation overhead, the discussions, the different personal/professional > priorities, key people withdraws, etc. Which in the end is all normal. > Let me first express some of my observations and feelings regarding the development of Commons RDF. I've always only been kind of a spectator in this project. I see Apache Commons as a platform for other projects to come together and share code. This is why I wanted Commons RDF to become part of Apache Commons from the beginning. However I always had the problem that RDF felt like a very special topic to me. At my company I built enterprise applications and I never had a use case for Commons RDF. I think this was a problem from the very beginning. People just don't know RDF and that's why this project never built a wider community. I have thought a lot whether it was a good move to force Commons RDF to go through the incubator. We had a hand full of Apache people on board as well as people who know other open communities. The incubator feels like a too heavy burden for a small project that has the Apache way and IP already figured out. This is why we accepted Commons Crypto directly into Commons instead of forcing them to go through the incubator. My feeling is that Commons Crypto benefited from the adoption by Apache Commons. So who knows, maybe Commons RDF would have a much bigger community by now if it had not to go through the incubator. Some words about the (small) community: I realized that there where heavy discrepancies among community members, but I could not take party in the arguments because I simply don't know RDF. It's sad that we could not find a common ground but I think this has something to do with fundamentally different opinions about how RDF should be modeled in Java. It's probably not possible to reach consensus in such a situation. It's a pity that several people left in the end. > > But that's part of the past, we have to look to the present. And if I look > to our team I can only count two active contributors Stian and myself), > which is clearly not enough to help the major toolkits (Apache Jena and > Eclipse RDF4J) to converge towards a commons API; we clearly lost the > timing on that (Jena 3.x is out there for quite a while and RDF4J's first > milestones came out last week). > > So I'd like to make a straight question to all our community: what do we > want to do with the project? > > If I'm honest, currently I'm more about retiring the podling than continue, > but you may have a different point of view... and I'd live to hear it. > I'm very happy to see that you (= the Commons RDF) community have integrated into the Apache Commons community. You take part in discussions about general matters of Apache Commons. This is important, because Apache Commons is not a community of subcommunities, but a community maintaining several independent components. I think we can propose to graduate Commons RDF to Apache Commons for the following reasons: - Commons RDF had 2 successful releases. (Imaging and Functor, while already proper components never had a release) - several people are interested in the code - the members of the Commons RDF community have started to feel part of Apache Commons - Commons RDF still is a project that can be used by other Apache projects. So if you guys want to take this to the next level, you'll have my support. Benedikt > > > -- > Sergio Fernández > Partner Technology Manager > Redlink GmbH > m: +43 6602747925 > e: [email protected] > w: http://redlink.co >
