There should be 3-5 points we make every-time about why 2.0 is the cat's pajamas.
Unlike a commercial vendor we aren't caught between the rock and a hard place that forces vendors to trade off forcing users to go thru upgrade hell to assure they can pull down some more revenue. We get to build what we hope is a better thing and if it is people will migrate to it.
We should not ever complain that other large constituencies haven't 'gotten with the program.' We should always talk about how it's hard for these large constituencies to move, to reengineer. Boy we have sympathy for it. We work with them. We respect them.
Unlike a commercial vendor, we do not have an end-of-life plan for 1.3. We do no intend to have one. As long as people want to work on it, more power to them! Nobody should every be embarrassed that they haven't switched to 2.0. Try it, you'll like it.
There is a fun transition in progress. The 1.3 crowd had a lot of people who were very passionate about operational focus - i.e. apache embedded as a component in a large complex system of other junk (people, business, middleware, whatever). Overtime that assured that it aligned nicely with the needs of the people that run real websites.
The 2.0 crowd is more inward looking, very expert in how to engineer the web server engine. When the 2.0 enterprise emerged a lot of 1.3 folks wandered off, the refactoring work wasn't what they were passionate about. As 2.0 is adopted by the operational crowd we will see more contributors with those passions returning. They will help to make adoption and upgrade easier. They will help to polish the beast into something that is fits their needs better and better.
Some of the rough going around the heavy weight complementary products (the middleware, the platforms, the larger sites, etc) is tied to that, or at least analogous to that.
- ben
"Upgrade - the most frightening word in modern computing."
On Tuesday, February 4, 2003, at 09:31 PM, Greg Stein wrote:
A while back, I received an interview request for a story on Apache 2.0 and
its adoption. I think that it turned out quite well, and the author appeared
to give a fair treatment overall.
Check out the story at:
http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/20572.html
Some questions for thought: if we start banging out versions right and left,
then will people actually upgrade? Are we doomed to live with 1.3 forever?
Or do we have to stick with today's architecture to support binary
compatibility for N years?
Cheers,
-g
--
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/
