Dear Lucene PMC, This email is to address the current vote by the Lucene PMC regarding a change of status for the Lucene.Net sub-project and the general future of that project.
The current process, which is moving towards a change of status for the Lucene.Net project (either to the incubator or attic), seems to be contrary to the interests and needs of the community surrounding the project. Since the issue has come up, there has been a significant response from the Lucene.Net community expressing their desire for this not to happen and their willingness to contribute to the project in order to see it move forward. Unfortunately, the committers on the project have not responded in a meaningful way to either the requests from the Lucene PMC or the interest expressed by the Lucene.Net community. This does not show a lack of vitality to the community or project, but rather a lack of interest on the part of the current committers. Let's have a look at who is on the current committer list: - George Aroush - DIGY - Doug Sale - Michael Garski Of that list, the last two, Doug Sale and Michael Garski have been uninvolved for the majority of 2010 both in terms of making commits to source control and in terms of communication on the mailing list. George has been largely uninvolved with the project since 2008. DIGY has stated clearly and publicly that he is frustrated with being the only developer on the project and has decided to no longer work on the project because of this. When the issue of a status change came up and the community called for leadership, DIGY and George both took part in the discussion. George, the defacto project leader, did not respond to community requests for changes in the project vision, management or codebase, thereby alienating a large part of the motivated potential contributors in the community. George has also been unresponsive, both to the PMC and the community at large. Those contributors who have attempted to support the effort to move forward with the project have not been able to engage him despite their efforts. There was a general assumption that George would either meet the needs expressed by the Lucene PMC through his own efforts or coordinate effort by the community contributors to meet those needs. Neither of those things have happened. It is clear the George, like the other three committers, is not able to meet the needs of the project, either due to a lack of interest, time, or some other unknown factor. So, of the four possible committers, all four are completely unavailable and have displayed a lack of activity and lack of interest in being part of the project. This situation has led to a complete confusion in the community as to how to move forward with the project. The would-be contributors either do not know what to work to do (and thus have not contributed due to lack of guidance), or have had their patches and contributions ignored by the committers. Many of those would-be-contributors have simply moved on and forked the project outside of the ASF due to their inability to contribute. This is following the pattern of 'Revolution' as defined in http://www.apache.org/foundation/glossary.html#Revolution and detailed by James Duncan Davison. Unfortunately none of the current committers are involved in this process, and as such, this revolution is occuring outside of ASF, rather than in ASF's source control. It also means that these forks will never have the opportunity to be merged back into the trunk. There is a strong community around this project. There are numerous other significant and active open source projects in the .NET space which depend on Lucene.Net as a library, as well as countless commercial products that depend on it. There is a strong community interest in seeing this project move forward and remain vital and active. The sensible and correct action for the Lucene PMC is to remove all four of the current committers from the Lucene.Net project, and establish a vote for new committers to be assigned to the project from the users community. A change of status will not help this project or it's community in any possible way. New committers, who are interested, motivated, and responsive are what this project needs. This is my personal request, but I believe that I speak for a substantial portion of the Lucene.Net community by asking the Lucene PMC to please cancel the current vote and address this problem in a more appropriate and responsible manner. Please grant the Lucene.Net community the power to be self-determined by enabling it's active and motivated members to choose a new group of committers. On a related subject, it is notable that unlike other Lucene sub-projects, Lucene.Net does not have representation within the Lucene PMC, and as such, the PMC's decision making process is occurring without any PMC member being directly involved with the community or project. I further propose that once a new group of committers is established for the Lucene.Net project that one of those members be made a Lucene PMC member. This will assist the PMC in better managing the project in the future. Sincerely, Troy Howard
