> On 30 Apr 2015, at 05:31, Ron Wheeler <[email protected]> wrote: > > My point was about the suggestion that you might want to add it as a TLP in > ASF but there were concerns about the amount of effort to start an ASF > project.
For Moqui Framework as an ASF project my concern really isn’t about the effort required, it would be WAY easier than when OFBiz went through the incubator. My concerns are about the community management approach, the forced growth of the community to graduate from the incubator (leading to hurried and possibly bad decisions about who to include as committers and PMC members), the ASF trademark policy and it’s use to go beyond what the Apache 2 license requires using trademarks as another channel for legal threats, the infrastructure constraints, and so on. The main benefit to joining the ASF: branding. It is a HUGE taboo to even say such a thing (and in the incubator proposals they want an ack that this is NOT a reason for joining the ASF), but it is the reality. For OFBiz the main benefit we've seen over time, IMO, had nothing to do with the oversight or community structure or infra or anything legal, but just having the Apache name on the project to boost confidence in the software. The irony is that the ASF has no policies related to software quality, but this is the public perception, helped along by no shortage of public statements by many people involved with the ASF. Maybe it’s more acceptable to say the ASF community model leads to higher quality software, that’s the general mantra anyway, but compared to other models I haven’t found that to be especially true. The ASF approach has it’s place and it’s great for certain types of software, but IMO is too inflexible for greater innovation to happen which is why most ASF projects start outside the ASF and join the foundation after reaching a certain point of maturity, and mostly by companies wanting to grow a community around a piece of software to reduce maintenance and support costs. That isn’t a bad thing, such software tends to do very well long term! -David
