Dan Creswell wrote:
Yeah, River could be a place for this but better scale and freedom might be achieved by following a more Linux type model where people maintain these projects whereever and when they get critical mass/popular acclaim or whatever get merged or moved or whatever.
That is also a model and I have no wisdom to say whether that is better or not. But below some things that crossed my mind. I wonder whether if you can get successful as an open source project somewhere else why would you make the move to the ASF (I'm aware established project do sometimes). Is the ASF also not all about facilitating communities and providing a trusted legal body, that way providing a lower barrier to participate for individuals/companies etc. We have have different places where people are able to operate as group/community but I can't recall them being successful (in terms of diversity of committers), most of them are all individually/company led efforts. Maybe this is like cursing in the church but is being part of the ASF not also taking advantage of the brand and should that attract new and old people to participate. I've seen remarks floating around from which I can only conclude the ASF is the Lourdes of OSS ;-) Also if attracting more developers to Jini is about becoming more 'buzzword compliant' such as with 'Spring enabling everything' should Apache River be a place where that work can be done? For me there are boundaries such as the work at Apache River should not violate with Jini's core principles, but there are huge gray areas where people might want to go and where I'm not in the position to judge whether that is right or wrong, although I might silently think they have been smoking grass. There are code and concepts I will defend fiercely and as long as we can exercise control over that not being 'infected' by the grass smokers ;-) I think I am fine with that, assuming there is really a group of people that can agree to work on something and whether the organizational model can cater for that. The people circling around the 'core' *might* well be the people that are partly subject to Jini not getting as popular as it deserves, if those core people are going to judge each and every line of code submitted here it might stay rather quiet here and the psychiatric clinics full of people. For this purpose I hope we can decouple a few things in the future and maybe a second stage rocket can propel 'Jini' into space. As you might read between the lines and the absurdities I'm not so sure about many things concerning the way forward with this project as a whole. It will be the outcome of a lot of things, therefore I have great troubles to say what is right or wrong at this stage. And with the omission of a Jini god whispering in my ear I'm afraid I can't ask for anything else as just starting with what we have now, get the essentials in place and see how things progress. I hate to spend loads of time discussing what we should/could do with no clear outcome to just find out there is no substantial participation from the first moment on. Just some thoughts I have ... I'm really looking forward to insights provided by others by which I can make up my mind. BTW any implied relation between Spring lovers and those smoking grass is purely based on coincidence. -- Mark
