Greetings,
I think the growth of Jakarta and other umbrella projects is a sign of success. Having too much is a nicer problem than having nothing or being plain ignored. I am a newcomer to the ASF and do not know very much about the Apache organization. What I know is that Apache has an excellent reputation. However, reputation is an asset that melts faster than snow in a hot day. When log4j joined the Jakarta umbrella many hesitant users decided to adopt log4j as their logging library. Having log4j under Apache basically make the following statement: "there are many logging libraries but this one is Apache." Clearly our project benefited from this Apache endorsement.
I dare to hope that the reverse is also true. When good projects join Apache the reputation of the organization is strengthened. When jakarta-log4j was announced, one user wrote that "the best projects eventually became Apache projects." I can hardly imagine a better seal of approval. Inviting good projects to join our umbrella should be viewed as a win-win situation.
Coming back to the issue at hand, no one should underestimate the dangers of overstretching. I think that by letting the project commiters make most of the project related decisions the dangers of centralization and overstretching are alleviated. At the same time we need more cohesion. Guideline documents suggesting project decision making processes, a common project directory structure, a common project web look-and-feel, and solution to other commonly encountered problems could increase the cohesion between the different projects.
I feel that by being part of Jakarta I am part of a larger family of developers. As part of that family, I will use the tools produced by other members not because I have to but because I can. What I like most about OSS is the exhange of ideas. Being part of the Apache community makes it easier to share ideas and that makes it worth the effort.
Changing the scope of the Jakarta project alone will not have any tangible effect. (Here, I am assuming that the intend is to extend the scope not restrict it.) Defining the Jakarta scope is just one step in the right direction. The scope is a bit like a constitution. We also need a whole body of supporting guideline documents (legislation).
Before people sending flames, notice that I used the word guidelines and not rules. The last thing we need are more hard rules. Just my two centimes. Ceki
ps: On a related note, I don't think this discussion should be held on the ant-dev list. Shouldn't there be a list for project wide (Jakarta) discussions?
At 13:52 31.01.2001 +1100, you wrote:
Sam,
> I'll take the liberty of excerpting another statement from Roy Fielding: > > So, in case anyone is wondering why these "umbrella projects" aren't > working the way we'd like, I'd say it is because they exceeded their > mandate. I think they did so with extremely good intentions, and the > board was kept > somewhat informed along the way, but it certainly wasn't by design.
I guess I don't have the full context here. When Roy says, "these projects aren't working", I have to ask to what he is referring. How and for whom are these projects not working? Is this coming from the project committers, from the PMC itself, from users?
In the end I guess we are going to need to understand the role of the PMC. When the guidelines say the PMC "is responsible for setting overall project direction", what does that really mean in practice? How does it do carry out that role?
> > What I am trying to do now is determine if there is, in fact a "Jakarta > community". People working together towards common goals. It was my > assertion that there was, but I must say that at the moment I'm a bit > underwhelmed by the number of responses to this query.
If there is a Jakarta community, what are its common goals? If we say something broad like Server side Java, then there are other candidate technologies where there is little activity such as JMS, EJB, etc. When this has come up, it has often been stated that there is no need for Jakarta to pursue such technologies since there are other good OSS solutions for these. That is certainly a reasonable statement but if this is true, then what is to be Jakarta's charter?
Conor
---- Ceki G�lc� - Independent IT Consultant
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