I never thought of this possibility. I always felt Rivet wasn't mine after all and probably unconsciously never granted myself the right of thinking in these terms.
ASF is somewhat bureaucratic and rigid, no doubt. It's grown a lot and became tailored to let many large projects coexist. I wasn't a committer or member in the early times, but I always thought ASF was a collection of projects which had at the center the Apache HTTP Web Server. Apache Tcl fits exactly this model, and it would all the more so if we consider also the projects we dropped because unmaintained (mod_tcl, etc). But the web server (despite being still central for the Internet at large) is not the core of ASF anymore. There are ~150 projects in ASF, some of them really, really big and with large and thriving communities. I was impressed by the number of top level projects Apache Hadoop gave birth. We don't fit this picture anymore, unquestionable. Recently on the board list someone pointed out that Apache never accepted umbrella projects in order to have a more timely and accountable management. Well...Apache Tcl is an umbrella project, we declared it at the beginning of our home page, in very first statement. Definitely we are misplaced if you see it this way.
On the other hand we are tightly connected to the Apache web server and I see some danger ahead. It happened to me recently to show a young engineer a project I did using Rivet and Tcl. He didn't know of Tcl and became suspicious of it. I could only mitigate his perplexity when I showed Rivet is developed under the hat of ASF. Branding is a key problem, also in the Open Source world.
-- Massimo --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
