"Craig R. McClanahan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> As you will note in this case, and in many others, there is no such thing as
> the "Sun" viewpoint on many TOMCAT-DEV issues. And that's appropriate -- we
> are individuals with our own opinions.
I am not going to comment on this as I used to be a Sun employee...
> Of course, the very same thing can be said about any mythical common "ASF
> Member" viewpoint ... :-)
Sorry, but I strongly disagree with you on this one: the "mythical" ASF
Membership _means_ something... If there's one thing an ASF member should be
aware of, is its position within the foundation. I explain:
Committers are "code monkeys" (sorry for the expression, but can't find
anything better than this :) I'm the biggest code monkey of all). A
committer is tied to his subproject (Tomcat in our case), his "sphere of
interference" is the code in that particular repository.
Committers report to the PMC, and its members. The PMC manages all the
sub-projects for a given umbrella. Each PMC member "sphere of interference",
then, is the overall project code. Of course given the size of a project
code (think about only ALL Jakarta code), the PMC does not deal with each
individual commit, but gives guidance (for example) in case of legal
complications, overall code guidelines, development methodology and such.
Each PMC reports to the Board, and the board is that part of the foundation
responsible for all code in all repositories, plus non-trivial matters such
as money, conferences and so on...
So, where do an ASF member stands? An ASF member is physically one of the
owners of the code (given the (C) that we put on each file), but what's its
relationship with the code? If he wants to do a commit, he needs to be a
committer, if he wants to organize a project, he needs to be in the PMC, and
if he wants to manage money or major legal issues he needs to be on the
board...
An ASF member _is_ the impersonation of the Apache "spirit" in itself, I
might not know ANYTHING about PERL (for example), but if someone asked me to
teach a PERL developer all about the Apache "way of doing things", I can do
that, because I've been around for long, because I've seen it happen all
before, because because because, and because of all this, the other ASF
members decided I was a person worthy of being a member myself. And not
worthy because of what I wrote (doh, I would never be one), but because of
what I think, of my opinions and ideas on "how things should be done"...
And this has _major_ influence in how the ASF actually _WORKS_... For
example look at our license: why is it drafted that way? Why it's so
completely different from the GPL? Because we, members think in a particular
way, have a common background of intersecting needs and ideas.
Or even look at our latest interaction with your employer (Sun, for the
records), about Java specification and their interaction with open-source
communities: the project, the code, doesn't matter to the ASF (we're ready
to put large portions of it in a trash bin for what it's worth), all that
matters is that we can do things how we think they should be done...
Now, WHY I got upset with Remm? Because he wrote to Chris (not a member, not
a committer, not "one of the Apache freaks") from his "APACHE.ORG" email
address (and _therefore_ impersonating the whole Apache community), asking a
questionable request. And Chris, since he's a smart kid and figured this all
out by himself, actually wrote to the community saying "hey what's up, is
this guy _really_ representing you all?"...
I got upset (and still am) because each one of us must be really _aware_ of
what he writes in private and/or public when his email address is
"[EMAIL PROTECTED]", because he is _de_facto_ representing an entire
community with that email address, and by doing this, he _must_ be so aware
of the _responsibilities_ that using that address involves.
It's just a matter of ethics...
Pier (who rarely posts from his @apache.org address)
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