On Mon, Apr 29, 2019 at 3:36 PM Niels Charlier <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
What is far more bizarre is that some gets really mad about, but
decides to not communicate or report it for months and then
launch passive aggressive personal attacks when someone else
reports (and fixes) it.
I have lost any faith that you will fix whatever regressions you
cause, that's why I did not communicate, I was sure you'd have put up
excuses and not do anything, which would have just made things worse.
Just recently we had a discussion on gwc-devel about a randomly
failing test that you introduced, I believe your comment was that you
just adapted a test that Gabriel made. No fix was provided on your
part, the random failure is still there.
Unlike what you seem to suggest, I am pretty sure that all or
most of what I have done in the past few years that is not in
community modules, are actually just bug fixes. (I guess it is
disputable whether making config pages cluster safe is a feature
or a bug.) But any major core development has been a long time.
Yes, the large works are a few years old (app-schema, Resource, CSW
ISO), but I saw no indication that anything changed in your attitude
towards the project and maintenance of your work. Hence my assumption
above.
I have done and still do in fact contribute with volunteering
work, such as reviews (including for colleagues of yours) and
maintenance, including for code I wrote for a company who paid me
to develop certain modules or core changes but never intended to
pay me to maintain these. I can always be contacted about this
work, and I have taken that personal responsibility upon myself
entirely, and I am always willing to continue to do so. As far as
that certain company is considered, they couldn't care less if I
had developed that stuff and disappeared afterwards, not even
being contactable about it.
This is problematic, because if you don't maintain your contributions
to supported modules, someone else will have to, and that someone is
a handful of already heavily overloaded core developers, often using
significant amounts of their spare time every single week. I think
GeoServer as a project has no capacity left to receive "contribution
dumps" where the developers provides code and then leaves to do
something else.
The other developers contributing a similar amount of commits
are actually active in the community with a number
of unpaid activities that help the project stay alive, on the
user lists answering questions, on the dev list participating
to discussion, participating to the monthly bug fix code sprint,
and cutting releases.
Jody once quite correctly called it "the cost of doing business
in a open source project".
Given that your activity is not a charity, but it's instead paid
for, business, it's only fair to expect the same of you.
Not all major contributors are active any more.
Yes, that is indeed part of the above problem, the ones that are left
are more and more overworked, not only from the point of view of the
amount of actual coding to do, but more importantly in terms of
cognitive load, one thing having to manage 2-5 modules, another
entirely is to have to manage and be proficient with several tens of
them, I cannot comment about others, but personally I am working
beyond my limits.
I cannot really commit to participate in meetings and releases,
because I cannot commit to having enough availability at the
right time unfortunately to do this as a volunteer because of
other obligations. Responding to emails and making reviews as a
volunteer is something else entirely, because I can do that at
any time, in the middle of the night if need be. After all, my
own personal time is the only resource I have for this, and I do
the best I can to help the geoserver community. I am not a
profit-making business who sells products and services based on
geoserver, I am just a very simple freelance programmer on his
own. I don't know if there are many others who have participated
an entire week of code sprint purely as a personal volunteer,
paying everything except for the flight out of their own pocket,
and missing a week's worth of work in opportunity cost - not in
the context of a larger company.
That participation was appreciated, but what keeps the project alive
is day to day participation. Think of it as having to keep up with a
cow farm, you can show up and do something wonderful for a week long,
but if you then leave them for a year and nobody cares about them, by
you come back all the cows are dead.
I do these things to do good, not to do evil. I believe in this
model of development, and I also wished companies would invest
more in the community work. Again, I am not a business, just a
simple programmer, and I could easily earn the same living
without caring at all about geoserver and its community. This
picture you want to paint of me as a leech who takes and
profiteers but never cares or gives is just not close to reality.
I simply do my best with the resources I have, but I am not perfect.
You are a business, you just happen to be a single person business,
but what you do is similar to what GeoSolutions does, we don't sell a
downstream product, simply provide improvement and bug fixing
services (so in the end we get paid by the hours worked). And then we
dedicate part of the company time, and in the case of some of us,
part of personal time, to keep that code going, once the contract is
long gone.
Your portion of business relating to GeoServer exists because someone
keeps the project alive by answering user questions, doing releases,
participating to the monthly bug fix sprints and the like, without
being paid to do that.
I understand that you don't have the same amount of activity and
don't pretend you show up for releases once every two months like we
do, or be the most active dev on the user list, or participate at
most bug fix code sprints, but at some of those (releases, bug fix
sprints, fielding user questions), yes, you should.
There is not much need for additional support, because this
concerns functionality that geoserver according to the
documentation already provides: the iso metadata profile, but
which currently really doesn't work properly. The alternative is
to have a new CSW community module with iso metadata profile
properly supported. I do think if even the small bug fixes get
ignored, this is a personal rather than pragmatic matter. I don't
see how any of the CSW stuff I did can cause problems for anyone.
It is personal, and I've said so multiple times in multiple places.
Business is indeed not personal, it's exchanges of money with a
service, I don't have to like the customer. Using spare time is a
personal choice instead, and I do all my un-paid reviews on Saturday
and Sunday mornings (for the joy of those contributing in paid hours,
and wondering why it takes so much time to get one and so much
un-synchronized with their needs to get code in).
This makes open source projects something about people, unlike other
things like healthcare where one can expect a service in a impersonal
way (but only because taxes were paid for it). So yes, personal is
the norm in free software communities, you'll have to learn to deal
with it.
About ISO support, I did not work on that part of the CSW machinery
(only covered dublin core and the generic service engine), in order
to review the changes I'd first have to learn about what an ISO
record is, and how the code producing it works. That would require
even more spare time to be used.
I don't expect people to do all this for me out of the goodness
of their heart, I was in all honesty hoping that people would be
able to use this.
I can see the usefulness of the work done (extension of ISO metadata
support to cover more elements), I'm simply not willing to take on
its review and long term maintenance myself. Again, sorry to sound
like a broken record, but if a module is supported, it needs someone
to willing to maintain it, adding new code just makes live harder for
those that have volunteered to do such maintenance. I volunteer to
maintain the code I write, not other people's code.
Admittedly, I also like to avoid that maintaining forks becomes
to much of a complicated matter. I understand the bigger reviews
are more tricky, but I am very willing to trade time for this and
for example, get assigned some reviews and/or bug fixes in exchange.
Hopefully someone will show up that is willing to trade horses with
you here. Good luck! :-)
Cheers
Andrea
==
GeoServer Professional Services from the experts! Visit
http://goo.gl/it488V for more information. == Ing. Andrea Aime
@geowolf Technical Lead GeoSolutions S.A.S. Via di Montramito 3/A
55054 Massarosa (LU) phone: +39 0584 962313 fax: +39 0584 1660272
mob: +39 339 8844549 http://www.geo-solutions.it
http://twitter.com/geosolutions_it
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