On Sunday 26 September 2004 07:24, David Leangen wrote:
The main reason that I am so impressed with this project--and have
committed myself to it now by refactoring my entire project to use the
current version of Avalon--is mostly thanks to the incredible support given
by Steve. Quite frankly, I have never seen that type of committment to any
open source project. What has impressed me most about Steve is that he is
really concerned with the project's users.
<snip/>
However, it appears to me that Steve is setting an important trend, one that at least for me inspires even greater confidence in the ASF. Isn't this the type of image that that ASF _should_ be projecting?
Unfortunately, we have been told by the overlords of ASF that users doesn't matter much.
What you have been told is that the ASF board has lost trust in Mr. Stephen McConnell's ability to handle disagreement in a way that brings positive energy into a community instead of burning it down in flames of friction.
This type of biased inferencing shows you precisely what I'm talking about.
The ASF cares about long-term stability of a project a lot more than about short-term acquiring of newbies. Why? because once you depend on a project, it's hard to go back, especially invasive frameworks like Avalon's.
Ask around: there are several examples of these users that got "sucked in" by the great PR skills and were later damaged by their inability to prevent some others to do incompatible changes without a constructive consensus-driven approach.
The last example of this (and what started the last of the flame fests) was Stephen's attempt to repaint Avalon with merlin colors and remove the framework (its code and documentation) from a visible position.
Ask yourself: if the HTTPD 2.0 project wiped out the documentation of the 1.3 branch because "considered obsolete" what kind of image would that have given the foundation? it doesn't matter that 2.0 is soooooo much cooler than 1.3 and the documentation is way better and more professional. It does not matter for those who depened on 1.3 and have no reason to upgrade (or such an upgrade is too expensive for them to balance the banefits of 2.0)
This is called "respect for your peers once they disagree on what you say and they get hurt by your decisions".
Stephen has *repeatedly* shown how he favors friction-driven escalation-type resolution-making processes rather than friendly, respect and consensus-driven ones.
This is tollerated (or even encouradged!) in other communities, but not here in the ASF.
This is what the board, the people that left avalon and formed excalibur, and the various projects that depend on avalon's code are concerned about.
I think you should be too if you plan to depend on this code and you should also be thankful that there are people that watch over years of a projects dynamics to understand how they can make this project backed up by a community that can give you that guarantee that two years down the line you won't regret the decision to depend on this code.
some of the friction you percieve here is also created by those who *did* make that decision and they are now realizing that might not have been such a great one and are trying to keep the boat afloat.
long term stability of a project depends on the health of a community and friction-driven consensus leads to one-man-shows (like Merlin, were 90% of the project is done by a single person) that have a much higher chance of dying or change direction in an uncontrollable manner.
I hope this helps.
-- Stefano.
smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
