Duncan is the original author of both Tomcat 3.x and Ant. He became more and more involved into open source evangelization activity in Sun (where he worked at that time) and detached from the Ant development community.
At some point, he came back, he didn't like some of the technical/design choices that were done and proposed his own. Since these changes were revolutionary, he wanted to use the rules for revolutionaries and start working on its own internal fork codenamed 'amber'.
Dry story: he was told he had to re-earn committership in order to do that. He tried to fought that, but got pissed after slamming on some rubber walls and left, leaving a bad taste in many people's mouths. His own first.
I differ with that rendition, and believe that it is harmful to the community for it to be propogated.
Duncan rejoined Ant and was immediately accepted as a committer. He started work on an internal fork named "AntEater". This went on for a short while, until another fork came along named "AntFarm". At that point, Duncan said "Whoa Bessie" and started to put forward a case that he had a unique right to determine what codebase bore the Ant name.
This lead up to a PMC meeeting with Brian and Roy in attendance where it was affirmed that the name of a project went with the expressed wishes of a majority of commmitters to that project. This has been the policy that we have followed in Jakarta ever since.
References:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=ant-dev&m=97712718421034&w=2 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=97712745500023&r=1&w=2 http://jakarta.apache.org/site/pmc/01-01-17-meeting-minutes.html
- Sam Ruby
P.S. It is my understanding that what is now Apache HTTPD 2.0 is also the result of a number of forks, one of which ultimately emerged as being the one accepted by the community.
