Daniel Warner wrote:
I think I see a pattern here. Put a short email in favor of Apache to
Jonathan, and you get a huge one in return.
Well, if you didn't want me to respond, you shouldn't have written your
comments.
The more you try to
actually argue with his points, the longer and more condescending the
response. It is almost like free energy! Someone ought to invent a
power station to harness this amazing source of energy and time so
that it is not a total waste any more! Hmm. I wonder if agreeing
with him will reduce his response or perhaps even give me the last
word! Would that be a first? Let's give it a go:
On 4/27/06, Jonathan Revusky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Daniel Warner wrote:
The
"meritocracy" idea at Apache is not about who does the work best.
It's just about who does the work. You do the work, you make
decisions.
You're joking, aren't you, Daniel? You're saying this is a "meritocracy"
in which you gain merit by doing work, but the quality of the work
doesn't matter?
Well, that's just ridiculous, isn't it???? C'mon...
You are right. It is ridiculous to say that the quality of the work
does not matter. Did i really say that?
Yes, it seems you really said that.
Well, if you think that is
what I said, you must be correct.
Well, there is an electronic archive of the conversation. It seems that
you were saying that the fact that people did work was what mattered,
independently of quality.
OMG.... What could I have been
thinking? <LOL>
I don't think you were thinking very much. It would be a good idea if
you did though.
2) SAF 2/WebWork is still in incubation. It's not even actually part
of Struts yet.
The "incubator" is just ASF pseudoreality. It doesn't correspond to
anything real. It makes no sense in this context. An actual incubator is
something you use to hatch eggs, or sometimes it refers to a kind of
environment that prematurely born babies are put in, because they could
not survive in the outside world yet.
The living entity that you incubate is not even an infant, it is
something in an embryonic state. Talking about how Webwork is still in
"incubation" does not reflect anything real, because Webwork is not an
unborn baby or even an infant. It is the moral equivalent of an adult, a
peer of the Struts project and other projects in its space.
This whole business of mature projects like Webwork being "incubated" is
just yet another striking example of the kind of bizarre use of words
that is resorted to when people talk about this so-called "Apache Way".
The "incubator" is like the "meritocracy". Even though the term is being
used as a kind of analogy, it does such violence to the normal meaning
of the English word that it's hard to even have a sensible conversation
about it.
I think you are on to something here. Please help us find better
words and ways to use them in describing these things. Then we can
avoid wasting time in all these silly semantic debates.
Instead of the "incubator" call it a "fraternity initiation rite".
Instead of a "meritocracy", call it a "mutual admiration club".
...
People who did inferior work overseeing or managing the people who did
the better work, does not, prima facie, correspond to the basic logic
and structure of what anybody would call a meritocracy.
"Anybody" is a bit strong given our conversation above, but I see
nothing else inaccurate in this paragraph. In fact, I would go
further and say that those do not even correspond upon second or third
examination either.
I don't know what you're saying here.
Really, when people accuse one of not understanding the "Apache Way", it
may be a kind of compliment. Frankly, I would be automatically quite
suspicious of anybody who asserts that they really understand all this
stuff. Now, okay, the projects that want to get branded as Apache
projects, the people involved have to demonstrate that they "get" this
Apache Way, but that's more like having to agree with some lunatics
because it's the easier path.
"Yeah, I get it, I really dig the Apache Way. Cripes, I don't know how
we actually developed all this code we developed outside ASF when we
didn't even have the Apache Way, though somehow we did. But now I see
the error of our ways. Yessah, I see the light."
"Praise be the Lawd! Hallelujah!"
Are you saying that people who like the Apache way of doing things are
all crazy zealots about it and believe that none of this code would
have developed without it?
No, I didn't say that. What I was saying was that, when projects in the
so-called incubator are supposed to "get" the "Apache Way", the people
involved just say what they think they're supposed to say. Probably most
of the people involved don't even understand what all the mumbo jumbo
about the Apache Way really even means.
Also, I would add that real open source hackers do not spend any energy
worrying about whether they are following the "Apache Way" or any other
similar such thing. People who create things and do stuff just get in
there and do it.
Well, it is a good thing you are so well
known for being a rigorously logical debater, otherwise I would
suspect this was just biased and illogical mocking.
Yes, I was mocking the thing. But if I was being illogical, you can
point it out. Do you believe that all the people who are supposed to
"get" the Apache Way as a condition for their project leaving the
"incubator" actually give a hoot about the Apache Way?
I know better
than that though. You are right on the money, and now I realize I
have been suckered by this whole Apache thing. It hasn't been useful
or productive at all. In fact, it has held back the development of
what could have been great code and will surely corrupt the pure and
beautiful WebWork code.
I know you're being sarcastic, but in your attempts at sarcasm, you
actually have a point. All the rhetoric about the "Apache Way" is not
useful or productive.
Oh, and i seem to recall reading once in a Jakarta discussion that the
ideal situation to the ASF is if all committers for a project are on
the PMC that oversees the project. Does that sound like it has
anything to do with who does better work? hmm.
I dunno, but it doesn't have anything to do with what is happening in
Struts, because in Struts, not all the committers are in the PMC...
Oh, but that seems inevitable for all those that stay here and stay
involved. They too will be assimilated and begin to believe that they
"get it". Such a shame... How lucky I am to have you here to open
my eyes before I too began to move beyond lurking and feeding trolls!
Well, you might think about how to make some kind of contribution --
here or elsewhere instead of just snide comments.
If they accepted your personally expedient definition of a
meritocracy, then maybe.
I'm sorry, Daniel, you are a very confused individual. I am most
certainly not the one promulgating a "personally expedient definition of
meritocracy"....
My apologies. Your definition of meritocracy must be the only correct
one in this context.
I don't recall offering a definition of the word. I just figured that
people knew what it meant.
It is you and i who have no legs to
stand on here. Don and Ted do tons of work, and therefore have all
the legs they need and more. Just pay attention to this list for a
week and that will be obvious.
Well, they and the others on the Struts PMC are in a position where they
have to answer certain questions regarding the lack of technical
progress on Struts 1.x IMO. That they do a lot of work themselves is
almost completely beside the point. An incompetent manager typically
will end up having to do a lot more work than a competent one. The
competent one manages to get other people involved and delegates work to
them, where the incompetent one ends up having to do everything himself.
Don and Ted may do all kinds of work, but Struts development stagnated.
Maybe they could have structured things better to get other people
involved who would carry things forward.
But anyway, even if they've put in a herculean effort, things must be
judged by the objective results. The objective results in the case of
Struts 1.x are really quite poor. And that is where the basic logic and
structure of meritocracy really would kick in -- that is, if this really
was being run as a meritocracy....
Ah, clearly I have misunderstood the responsibilities and nature of
the Struts PMC since they were incorporated when the Struts community
left Jakarta. I thought doing lots of work got you to be a committer,
Yeah, but what about the Catch 22? How do you do lots of work (and thus
earn committer status) without being able to commit code in the first place?
They'll say that you can submit patches, but there is no guarantee that
anybody will review them. This is like saying that I can gain merit
points by taking university credits. However, I can do all the academic
work, present term papers and write exams but there is no guarantee that
any prof will actually read them or grade them.
Note that, if this is a supposed meritocracy, you are, in principle,
competing with others to demonstrate merit. But the incumbent people
can, on completely arbitrary basis, review another person's work, and
"not get around" to reviewing yours.
So, some students get their papers graded and others don't. The profs
don't have to justify this even. Would you attend a university that was
run like that? Would you call such a madhouse a meritocracy?
so that you could then do the work more easily. Then committers that
stick around are brought onto the PMC because the people who do the
work are the ones that make the decisions anyway. I didn't realize
that the PMC was really supposed to manage other people doing the
work.
I dunno. What does the 'M' in PMC stand for again? What you're saying is
based on some kind of either-or fallacy. A person in a management
position can roll up his sleeves and do work alongside the people he is
ostensibly managing... Anyway, it's not up to me to explain all these
crazy conceptual categories, like PMC member vs. committer (and BTW, WTF
is an "emeritus committer")... My position is that none of it makes too
much sense anyway.
I think you have discovered another instance of them abusing
the English language. You must be right that they must answer for
these abuses! But please, if they are the ones using and working on
these projects, who is it they must answer to? Surely it is not me,
since I have only benefitted from their work for free. Is it you that
they must answer to? I really need to know this so that I will not
remain, as you say, "confused".
Yes, you are confused. If Husted and Brown and people like that just
went off to sourceforge and started their own personal projects, there
would be far less onus on them to justify anything they do. We would be
talking about their personal pet project, and they could do what they
want with it.
But something like Apache Struts is not their personal pet project. At
least, in theory, you have something called the ASF, which is a
not-for-profit entity created for the public interest, with a certain
charter. It receives contributions from corporations like Sun and IBM
and others, on the basis of the idea that it furthers certain goals.
Also, as a practical matter, the Apache brand name is something with a
lot of visibility and projection and work done by people like Husted and
Brown and others with that brand name will get orders of magnitude more
visibility and attention than it would otherwise. And this is a business
reality that people are are in a position to leverage and are able to
use this as a platform in consulting businesses and so on.
But again, they do not own the project. Unlike the situation where they
just go off and put up a project on sourceforge (and it gets the small
fraction of attention it would with the ASF visibility/projection) they
are not simply disposing of their own property as they wish; it is
basically like they are stewards of a public property. If the
stewardship of that public property is decided on meritocratic
principles, as claimed, they do have to justify things that they do. If
the results of their stewardship of that public property are as dismal
as they have been, it is right and proper that they should have to
answer certain pointed questions about it.
The above outlines the basic principle here that you (and others, I
guess) don't understand. There is a difference between the stewardship
of a public property and your own disposing of your own personal
property as you see fit.
Think about it.
Jonathan Revusky
--
lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/
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