On Fri, 13 Apr 2001, Peter Donald wrote:
> At 08:16 12/4/01 -0400, Sam Ruby wrote:
> >If you accept that you are in a world where interfaces that you are
> >depending on change frequently, then the problem to solve is optimizing the
> >communication paths.
> >
> >I don't accept that reality.
> >
> >I bet that 98% of the servlets out there would compile just fine against a
> >version of servlet.jar that was built two years ago. I bet that 98% of
> >these servlets will compile just fine against the version of servlet.jar
> >that will be built two years from now.
> >
> >The same can not be said for applications which depend on avalon or
> >turbine. Not two years, not one year, not six months, not three months.
> >Heck, I doubt that 98% of the applications which depend on turbine would
> >compile against the version of turbine that WAS BUILT LAST NIGHT.
>
> Welcome to opensource! Standards are not done here - we can implement them
> but we don't build them - for those please go elsewhere
> (IETF/W3C/JCP/Other). One of the advantages of opensource is people are
> free to adapt them to their own environments. Hence they do. If you want
> static versions go buy something from a major vendor. Even those generally
> do complete changes every major version (see MS and their DX1-8 or MFC
> versions).
>
In a backhanded way, I agree with this sentiment -- open source is
demonstrably good at creating great implementations, and not so good at
creating specifications. I suspect this is partly/mostly because many
open source developers rebel against the very disciplines that a
"standard" implies. (If you want a fight, let's talk about where the
curly braces should go on an "if" statement :-).
But this also raises an issue of who are the "users" we are trying to make
life easier for. More on this below.
> >Gump doesn't solve these problems. Peter Donald has outsmarted it.
>
> I haven't outsmarted it. I solved the problem that was presented. You have
> failed to pose any other problem that would make me adjust my position - I
> want low cost of entry.
>
> Have a look at all the projects under apache umbrella. Now rate the
> activity of each project excluding people who get paid to directly work on
> products. Now correlate this with cost of entry (of which jars in CVS is a
> factor). Excluding ant for the moment what do you see? ... Which ones have
> more community behind them? Which ones store binaries in CVS? Coincidence?? ;)
>
This paragraph begs for multiple responses, from different viewpoints (not
necessarily building on each other):
* How are you measuring "activity"? I would guess from your statement
that you are talking about developers doing commits -- but what about
they users who just want to USE your project in their own work and could
give a rip about how the thing is built. By that measure, I would submit
that Tomcat is far and away the most active Jakarta project, followed by
Ant, followed by Struts, followed by everything else. (Check download
counts and -USER list subscriptions and activity for corroborating
evidence). Tomcat 3.x and Struts contains no checked in JARs, Tomcat 4
only has patched versions of the stupid JAXP sealed jars until the next
version of JAXP fixes that for us.
* The number of binary distro downloads of most Jakarta projects is orders
of magnitude more than the number of people who download source distros
or update via CVS. Note that the popular packages for USERS include
convenient "all in one" binary distributions, despite the fact that they
don't use CVS to store JAR files. (Ant is sorta an exception - they
offer two downloads (Ant and optional.jar) but you have to go grab
everything else yourself).
* There seems to be a theory that only people who build from source can
contribute patches and enhancements. That is not borne out by
experience on the projects I'm involved in, because the source code is
there for examination anyway -- very large percentages of patches come
from people who are just looking at the "src" directory included with
the binary distributions.
* Your exclusion of "people who get paid to directly work on products"
in measuring activity doesn't sit well with me. Is my contribution to
Tomcat *illegitimate* because I'm paid to do it? I guess we'd also need
to throw out the contributions of lots of other people whose companies use
Tomcat and who contribute to it on company time, but it's not their full
time job. This kind of attitude denigrates the substantial contributions
of lots of people; you might want to rethink it.
* Finally, to show that I can be just as elitist :-), I'd say that being
able to build something like Tomcat from sources (by following the
directions included in the README) is a pretty good first level filter
for people worthy of being committers in the future :-).
> The exception of course is Ant - it only stores the absolute minimum jars
> in CVS. It is still popular to developers though partially out of necessity
> and partially because the excluded jars are non-essentials.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Pete
>
Craig
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