Michael Davey wrote:
Jakarta is the *brand*. It defines itself. Jakarta brand development. A brand can give a unique identity and grouping to an otherwise disparate and commodity range of goods and services.
Apache is a brand too, and, IMHO, a much stronger brand than Jakarta.
The relative brand strengths aren't important to this discussion (I think we will have to agree to disagree in any case). I was simply attempting to demonstrate two points:
* a brand can unify products that otherwise would have no business being together
* a brand can be used to give a concrete definition of otherwise abstract, ill-defined or hard-to-grasp concepts
I realize that there are people who have romantic notions about "Jakarta" and like to talk about preserving Jakarta for Jakarta's sake. But for the life of me, I can't see why. For me, it's always been about the codebase and its community. [snip] I go where my community lives; and my community is centered on a codebase, not a hostname.
[snip]
All along, there have been people who envisioned a "Jakarta community". But, what's the point of that, really? We already have the Apache community and the open source community. Why do we need another community within a community?
To me, there is a difference between the Jakarta community and the Apache community. I think that the Jakarta community have a slightly different set of values than the wider Apache community. The values aren't wildly different, but they are different none the less. I think that this difference is most noticable in the discussions on lists like this.
Now I'm not entirely sure I explicitly know both sets of values. In part this is because there is a difference between what the community claims as its values and how the community acts and in part because many of the values that the Jakarta community claims aren't written down.
Certainly, the Jakarta community tend to go about their business in a slightly different way to the wider Apache community. Sometimes, the Jakarta way seems to work better or seems to be leading the way (for instance near-total transparency and openness, even when in means "airing your dirty laundry", or commons and commons-sandbox) and sometimes the Jakarta way demonstrates that it hasn't learned the lessons that the wider Apache community learned the hard way (such as keeping secret the rationale for blocking an admision to a board of people).
Perhaps there is actually a "The Jakarta Way" that is similar to The Apache Way, that is not explicit right now. Such a term could encapsulate the Jakarta process, approach to the community and values.
The real, underlying issue with Jakarta is that most of our products are *not* about Java. They are about a feature set. Java was just a convenient implementation language, but most of our products could be implemented in other languages and made available to a broader community.
Agreed.
My fear is that if we don't work now to really understand The Jakarta Way, install the good bits into The Apache Way and document the problems and solutions to the bad bits, ASF may loose something of real worth and may not ever truely recover. I am not sentimental about the Jakarta name, but I do recognise that Jakarta represents something unique that we are in danger of loosing.
-- Michael
--------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
