As of about 2a EST this morning, 134,788 messages were posted to this list. Even for five years, that's a lot of traffic!
Most of those messages have been about users helping other users. Some others, often marked "Friday" or "Beer" have been about users entertaining users. :) And, occasionally, we have waxed introspective and discussed "What is Struts anyway?". Some people have said that Struts is a brand that marks a product. Our benefactor, the Apache Software Foundation, calls Struts a "Project". Project is a good word, but it's really a euphemism: Project is an ASF code word that means "Community". From an ASF perspective, we're not here to build software, but to build a development community, and let the community build the software. We believe that great communities build great technology. Over the years, the Struts community *has* built some great technology. Aside from the Struts Action package, we've built Tiles and the Validator. We've built Bean-Utils and the Digester. And Collections, and File Upload, and Resources. And Chain. A good portion of all the components in the Jakarta Commons today is technology that Struts built. The technologies that Struts built are not just gizmos we use with our own controller or taglib components. Dozens of other software projects, and thousands of teams, use these technologies every day, whether they use our application framework or not. IMHO, this is what it means to be a community rather than a product, a people rather than a brand. It means that first we try to help each other, and then we try to package our solution to share with all comers. But, the map is not the land, and the solution is not the project. Since today is my birthday, I thought I'd take the liberty of calling for a referendum on a topic that is close to my heart: What do you say? Are we a product or a community? Here's my +1 for community. -Ted. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
