On Sat, 26 Oct 2002, Sylvain Wallez wrote:
> I'd like to propose each committer to build a simple home page like that > one. Knowing each other is the first step towards building a stronger > community. And presenting ourselves to the outer world (this list is > closed) is a step towards widening that community. I don't have a home page (never got around to it yadda yadda), but the "Who We Are" page at Struts has a pretty good summary of my background: http://jakarta.apache.org/struts/volunteers.html I did not subscribe to the reorg list, so I'm blissfully ignorant of the "discussions" that have gone on there. I'm willing to give this list a try, because I really am interested in seeing if there is any consensus among us on who the "community" is that we are talking about. Historically, the more famous open source advocates that you hear about (either groups or individuals) have tended to be pretty political and absolutist in their statements. In particular, they spend (IMHO) way to much time being *against* things instead of being *for* things. Any moron can be against something ... and against something loudly ... be it another person, a company, a product, a technology, whatever. One of the things that attracted me to Apache in the first place was that the temperature seemed a little cooler and more pragmatic. Alas, there have been many occasions, especially in the last year or so, where this has not been the case. To the point where I sometimes find it personally embarrassing to be associated with some of the folks who have an apache.org email address too. I'm interested in participating in a community that is *for* something. There will be people that disagree -- that's fine. There will be people who think their approach is better technically -- that's fine. There will be people who don't believe in open source -- ok, we can make the case, in practical business terms, without put-downs and attacks that would make good references on a resume sent to political consultants. Where did all the folks that are reasonable and pragmatic go? The first thing for me to be for is high quality software. But high quality is not just an issue of cool ideas -- it's everything from an attitude about fixing bugs, to caring deeply about backwards compatibility, to focusing on things that people find useful (without calling them stupid if they don't). It goes on to an attitude about showing the world a better way, and educating/encouraging them to take a look. The second thing that is important to me, as a part of an open source developer community, is paying attention to the users of the products we produce. I definitely practice what I preach in this regard -- count up the answers I've give on the Tomcat, Struts, and Commons mailing lists here, and other forums elsewhere. Indeed, user support is one of my primary criteria for proposing new committers -- in addition to the criteria outlined on the Jakarta web site pages. I've been very heavily involved in the two largest and most successful (based on downloads and mailing list subscriptions) packages at Jakarta -- Tomcat and Struts. I've enjoyed the diversity of the Tomcat community, including surviving a potentially disastrous code fork that led to the "Rules for Revolutionaries" document that is part of Apache folklore. And I've enjoyed seeing how Tomcat's reputation for quality and performance have improved over time, and the many successful ways in which Tomcat has been employed. But I've enjoyed the Struts community even more. We're not political, we're passionate about creating a high quality piece of software, we are serious about backwards compatibility, we don't put down users who ask newbie questions. We even have "casual Fridays" on the mailing list, where interesting off-topic discussions on anything from "my first computer" to "online IQ tests" have occurred. And the world (both developers and users) have responded to this difference in tone, just as much as they have to the quality of Struts. The community grew from zero, a little over two years ago, to what you see today (tens of thousands of downloads per month, 13 active committers, 780 subscribers to STRUTS-DEV, 2300 subscribers to STRUTS-USER, applications based on Struts all over the world, support built in to a wide variety of open source and commercial development tools, five Struts books coming out this fall, autographing coffee mugs at ApacheCon :-). That's the kind of Apache community that I'm interested in participating in. It's not JUST about cool software. It's about cool software that people actually use, and having fun interacting with the users as well as the developers. Am I dreaming to believe that such an approach would be attractive to a broader set of developers? Craig McClanahan
