Roy T. Fielding wrote:
<snip>
> Any given problem at Apache can be solved at least a dozen different
> ways, satisfying different sets of consumers, and reaching independent
> levels of perfections in the minds of their own designers. We should
> not fear internal competition.
>
> A federation is simply an umbrella project with no significant
> responsibilities of its own -- all of its projects report directly
> to the board and simply view the federation as a communal thing.
> I think XML and Jakarta should already fall into that category.
> Starting one is just like starting a project, except that the
> purpose is limited to community/commons like things and not actual
> products.
Hmmm - I hear what you are saying, and I don't disagree with the basic
thrust. It's why I've tried to be careful about how I position this.
However the issue I have is that I don't believe a Federation is ever
going to work in the ASF without the ability to do small products that
are not major projects in and of themselves, but things that will be
useful elsewhere. (Or is that what you meant by commons?) On a
personal level, I suspect I'm less focused on code than most people in
the trenches, but if I don't have something technical to focus on I'm
going to get disillusioned quickly.
So we want to create a project that can do components of code (e.g. the
xml-security libraries) but which has a broader focus of fostering
security software within the foundation.
I absolutely *don't* want to create a project that has control of every
bit of security software or to be telling people what should be used or
what should be started up. Thinking it through - that means the
resolution wording is actually wrong - I'm happy to change it to better
reflect that focus, but I don't want to throw away the ability to have
the code pieces in there.
Cheers,
Berin
