Hello Roland Thank you for the comments! It is encouraging to see that somebody undertook an effort of reading the proposal so carefuly and giving so many good comments!
We have started a discussion with Davanum Shrinivas from the Apache WS community. We asked Davanum to Champion the project within Apache. Davanum suggested that we post the proposal in the Incubator list and in the Apache Savan development list. The idea is to create an open discussion that would determine how and where Poloka project would be sponsored. I have posted the proposal in the Savan list as well. Yeh, "Mentor" section of the proposal should be renamed. The idea here is to separate the developers working on the code from domain experts that are taking part in this projct. The Domain Experts are currently consulting developers on the intent of the standards and also on the domain of enterprise software systems from the point of view of future users. Would renaming this section to "Domain Experts" make sense to you? Regarding the GPL code. Our intent is to remove all GPL dependency from the code prior to the initial relaease. None of GPL dependencies will remain in the list. I agree that University Research Community and Open Source Community not the same, but they are similar in some respect. They are simmilar because there is constant sharing of ideas through publications, demos and conferences. Researches working in the same field often know each other personaly. They comment on each other work and give tips on how to move forward. They are diffent in terms of code charing. It is not happening a lot on the research side currently. And yes, we do not know exactly how it is going to work in this enviroment, but we are willing to give it a try by relasing our stuff in the open. We are interested in making it work. Resesach progress could go so much faster if it would really happen. We have good indicatation from our peers so far.We have a long list of researchers that indicated that they would like to see this stuff in the open and contribute to it. So far PADRES code base has been developed through constant interaction and continous integration. The codebase is open to everybody in the project and eveyone can poetentially make changes to everybody else's code. In fact this is happening a lot when a student is preparing to graduate or past graduation. We expect that there will be more of that once the project is open sourced. The students would charge ahaed working on their ideas. This code will be visible to the community and anybody would have ability to contribute to that direciton if it makes sense to them. Isn't it how Apache project operate? I think I already addressed your comment about meritocracy by describing how the team operates. Does it make sense? The time span a thesis development is 2-3 years. Sometimes a student would go for a master and a doctor thesis and then it might take twice as long. In fact Alex Cheung is one of the people like that. He has been with the project from day one and he is still there contributing actively. Prof. Arno Jacobsen is conducting regular code reviews and is involved in architecture, design, troubleshooting, evaluations, and experiments. You are right, he is expected to commit more on the documentation side than on the code base. Cheers, Serge -----Original Message----- From: Roland Weber [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, August 23, 2008 3:48 AM To: general@incubator.apache.org Subject: Re: [PROPOSAL] Poloka Hello Serge, have you contacted the WebServices PMC about sponsoring this proposal? [EMAIL PROTECTED] seems to be a good place to pitch it and see how it fits into the existing web services projects at Apache. http://ws.apache.org/mail.html The "Mentors" section is somewhat irritating, as the Incubator also defines the role of a Mentor: http://incubator.apache.org/incubation/Roles_and_Responsibilities.html#M entor Maybe you can rename the section to distinguish it from the "Nominated Members"? The "External Dependencies" section lists mysql-connector.jar as GPL-licensed. Is the code using that JAR directly, or does it access MySQL through a standard interface like JDBC? The "Required Resources" section is meant to list the resources you will need at Apache. "it exists" is not correct there, since currently no Apache resources have been created for you. The "Orphaned Projects" section says "no risk". There is always a risk... Requests from individuals to get source code is a sign of _potential_ users, which _potentially_ could become developers at some time. Major software companies can change their plans and cut the funding for working on an open source project. I wonder how the University Research Community will interact with an open source community. Students working on a project to get a degree might have a short-term interest, contributing for a few months then loosing interest once they get their degree - just when they could have become committers. So this involvement depends on either students picking up a personal long-term interest, or professors bringing in new students. There's nothing wrong with that, but bringing in new people requires some effort of the existing community to show them the way. You can't run a project only with short-termers. Also, community merit is earned by regular contributions over a period of time. Students working on the project will have to get involved in a continuous way, not by working secretly on their thesis and dropping the result onto the community in a big-bang style when they're done. Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that all bad things will happen and that the project is going to collapse. Also, my university experience is somewhat outdated (10 years ago) and certainly not representative. But maybe you can change "no risk" to "low risk"? Turning several interested people and parties into a working open source community is not as easy as it may seem. The "Meritocracy" section sounds as if there is no meritocracy at all, and the "Community" section (...managed and organized by MSRG...) as well as the "Required Resources" section (...not available outside of the MSRG) add to that picture. From what I read, I believe you have a closed group of developers (=researchers+students) and that MSRG manages the development activities in a hierarchical way. There is a small mismatch between the lists of "Core Developers" and "Initial Committers". You are not mentioned as a core developer, but you probably will help with project organization, web site and other things. Arno Jacobsen is not mentioned as a core developer either, but the "Mentors" section says: <quote> Dr. Hans-Arno Jacobsen is the head of the Middleware Systems Research Group and he is leading all current research activities. </quote> Does the head and leader really find the time to get his hands dirty with the code and docs in the repository? Apache accounts are given to people who have a need for them. I'm not going to comment on the technical side of the proposal. Web services are not my area of expertise or interest. cheers, Roland --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
