On Jun 22, 2006, at 9:52 PM, Hani Suleiman wrote:
I'm fairly astounded by the amount of email generated due to my
name being on the initial committer list.
I'm astonished that you didn't expect it. Apache is a social
organization
that depends on trust, and one of the easiest ways to lose trust is to
take on a persona that doesn't accept responsibility for your own
actions.
It is interesting to note that all the people who have objected are
those who feel personally offended by some of my writing
(specifically, the tomcat and axis2 rants...ironically my tomcat
DefaultServlet rant was purely technical and did not degenerate
into my usual personal insult comfort zone).
I don't find your blog to be technical at all. It is mostly just
childish
whining, even when everything you say is accurate. It is not
constructive
criticism.
I'm sorry that you can't take a little criticism, and while I will
happily admit that yes, I did insult you in ways that you probably
didn't quite expect, I fully stand by everything I said, and will
still insist that Axis2 and Tomcat are awful projects, that are
badly written and have only gotten where they are today due to
marketing forces, instead of technical merit.
Then fix them or write a replacement. If you have time to entertain
yourself
on your blog, then you have time to fix the open source that you
dislike.
I am perplexed that you feel that a dislike of an Apache project
merits a membership rejection though. Does everyone at Apache love
every project there? If that were the case, then the whole
ecosystem is in a far unhealthier state than anyone on the outside
might suspect.
We live on criticism -- constructive criticism, that is. You don't
seriously
think your blog is constructive, do you? No, we don't all love each
other's
projects and we encourage participants to rethink entire
architectures on a
regular basis. Anyone who actually participated in a project,
instead of
just whining from a distance, would know that.
If Apache people feel that my technical abilities are not relevant,
and that what should matter in whether I am allowed in as a cxfire
committer is how willing I am to tow the party line, then I
shouldn't be on that list. Apache would be the first organisation
I've joined (or might have joined) that did not judge me on
technical merit; quite an irony considering the whole meritocracy
approach that Apache claims. This is, astoundingly, my first
experience of being judged not on technical merit, but on random
blathering that serves no particular purpose than ranting for
ranting's sake.
Meritocracy is based on what you have earned, not on your potential
ability.
Right now you are one of the few individuals in the world with negative
Apache merit -- IMO, you cause more damage by your whining personal
insults
than you have contributed in your critiques as a user or developer.
In fact, the only person I can think of at the moment with more negative
Apache merit than you is Marc Fleury. Are you happy now?
That doesn't mean you can't turn that situation around, start
contributing
in a meaningful manner, and have a huge impact on future Apache
projects.
It just means you are in a hole right now and should expect to dig your
way out before getting much respect here. That is what asking to be a
committer is about -- gaining our respect so that we trust you to use
our
infrastructure for good purpose without damaging any of our projects.
Just to set expectations, I will not stop saying things like
'Apache sucks', because I still do think that many of the processes
and members have some terrible flaws.
Why don't you just suggest a patch to the process? Most of our
documentation needs improvement. Saying "Apache sucks" without actually
contributing just means you are too lame to do better.
Members, however, are human. If you think they have terrible flaws,
then
find ways to work around those flaws (or find a nice way to fix those
flaws, if possible). Apache is a collaboration and our processes are
designed to enable decisions to be made in spite of disagreement,
because
there will always be disagreement when faced with design trade-offs.
Learning that is part of being a contributor. If you want to be a whiny
little prick, then you don't need collaborators and we don't need you.
I am not aware of any Apache membership requirements that state
that one's freedom of speech and expression are curtailed in any
way; it is after all an alleged meritocracy, all that matters is
how good the code I check in is, and how well I play within the
team I'm a member of. If the cxfire team at any point feels I'm a
liability rather than an asset, I would gladly leave. In fact I'd
like to think that I'm self-aware enough to leave way before they
feel the need to ask me to.
Again, you seem to have no clue what meritocracy means at Apache.
People who have been offended by you are saying that they think you
will be a negative influence on the project based on your past behavior.
Don't give me any trite excuses that your "blog persona" is somehow
different from your behavior as a professional -- that is bullshit and
you know it. Everything we do is part of being professional. The
Internet is our workplace.
You are a human being. Your actions impact other human beings.
You will be held accountable for those actions whether or not you
accept responsibility for them. That's life.
Apache membership and project membership are two different things.
We do, frequently, accept project members who have been assholes in
the past. Sometimes that works out, sometimes it doesn't. I don't
think this case is any different and I expect some new project in
this space to be incubated if the contributors are willing, once
people figure out what is actually being contributed.
I know plenty of Apache members who find many of the processes
cumbersome and onerous, yet are still active participants; nobody
seems to threaten them with being kicked out.
We don't need to. For one thing, they have earned our respect and
have the right to fix our processes. For another, they find out soon
enough that the processes exist to protect their own projects, and
they actually work when the shit hits the fan.
I believe in cxfire, and think it's a superb project. I think
competition in this space is healthy, and think it's rather lame
that people like dims and sanjiva keep trying to cast doubts on the
validity of the project, just because it happens to eat into their
projected revenues. It does feel like there's a small amount of
hypocrisy going around, where people express concern that cxfire
has many IONA people involved, without noticing that most of the
objectors are WSO2 people, who (quite rationally) put WSO2
priorities ahead of Apache ones.
Being open and clear about company affiliations is a requirement for all
incubator proposals, due to past experience, and has nothing special
to do with IONA or WS02. We get tired of repeating that to the same
people, over and over. Hopefully, the docathon will result in better
documentation of the proposal process.
Sanjiva and Dims have already earned our respect. I happen to agree
with
you that competition is healthy, and I do wish that folks in the Web
Services
project would stop trying to fit all of web services into their own
project.
However, I also know them well enough to say that WS02 is not the cause
of their priorities, and all that they are trying to do is protect the
communal spirit of Apache projects. They do that because they've grown
to care about Apache as a whole, in *addition* to their personal work,
and because they are used to the Cocoon way of doing things at Apache.
Each Apache project picks up its own culture and beliefs, in addition
to those learned from the old projects, and each has its own perspective
on what makes for a productive collaboration.
You, OTOH, don't know them well enough to suggest anything about their
priorities. You are just behaving like a fool as a result and should
try to listen and learn before making it worse.
Obviously, everyone would prefer to have a perfect product. I do not
believe that any single such thing exists -- a product is only perfect
if it exactly fits the needs of a given set of consumers, and not all
consumers have the same needs. So, at best we can have many different
products in the same space, each with their own trade-offs to fit their
own target audience. We gain from our ability to cut and paste between
projects when it suits our interests. We need to accept that and
promote
it as a good thing, not disparage each other's projects just because we
don't understand their target audience.
....Roy
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