Hi, > "With all due respect, I don't believe Apache did anything good with Flex. > They struggle with a lot of internal bureaucracy and I believe that without > clear leadership, this "meritocracy" thing just doesn't work. I agree at times there tends to be a lot more talk than action and being new to Apache we sometimes go about things the wrong way. But there have been a large number of changes, bugs have been fixed, the SDK is faster, has more features and is still improving. We have better international support, the SDK works on a wider range of Flash Player versions and Linux support is shaping up well.
It has been slow going and we can always do will a bit more help. There's still some low hanging fruit that can be fixed (see JIRA issues marked easytest or easyfix for example). If all of the existing committers tried to fixed a bug or contributed something every week (or month) there would be better progress. I personally think of it like doing a cryptic crossword, it's a challenge and you might not always finish or get it exactly right but you learn something along the way. :-) There are things that are certainly better than when Flex was at Adobe. - We respond to (and fix) user issues if we can. There's always room for improvement here but we have less resources than Adobe had and everything done by people in their free time. - There a focus on what what's practical and useful now rather than what's the current hype. - New directions and features are being explored (slowly), major changes have happened in the JS side and that shows great promise. - Anyone can contribute and make a difference. What we've done poorly. - Engaging existing contributors, business and users of the SDK to help out. They are now the owners of the SDK. - Communication about what been going on and where we would like to change. - Getting new releases out. > For the past year, Apache Flex community debated whether they should move to > Git IMO we moved to git for the wrong reasons (SVN was working fine and well supported at Apache and github mirrors were in place). Apache infrastructure took too long in making the change (which we didn't take into account), we didn't factor in all of the build issues, and the Git model is not really in sync with the way things are done at Apache. As a result some of the benefits of using Git are lost. I'm not sure that people realised that when the move was voted for. Other peoples opinion may differ form mine on that. > to much "nerd" driven, not enough "business realistic" driven." Businesses is more than welcome to contribute. I've only seen a few businesses sponsor (directly or indirectly) time or effort into this project. There are many businesses out there that use Flex and it would be in their interest if they contributed back in some way. If that's allowing employees to work of fixing bugs, promoting the SDK, helping out with documentation or in any other way it would be welcome. If someone was willing to pay me one day a week to work solely on Apache Flex I'd accept - think of it as a support contract :-) Thanks, Justin
