On 11/30/05, Martin Cooper <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I am very much against taking ASF content off-site, as it were. We have a > perfectly good wiki, and that's where our content should be. I know there > are a bunch of Confluence fans out there, and maybe it's a better product in > some ways. But the ASF has standardised on a wiki, and we shouldabide by > that. (Was anyone hosting ASF code on an SVN server outside the foundation, > before we moved to CVS, just because it was better? I don't think so.)
The ASF doesn't "standardize" on this type of tool. Them that do the work make the decisions. What tools a community uses and how we use them is up to the individual PMCs. What the ASF cares about is whether the project's development community uses the tools to collaborate. Point in fact, the only reason we have a JIRA instance now is because some projects started using their own instance off site. Because projects were voting with their feet, we were able to find volunteers to setup the JIRA instance. Now, people didn't push for our own JIRA instance because it was "wrong" to have an issue tracker elsewhere, we pushed for it because if some projects wanted to use JIRA, then it follows that others would want to use it too. Looking at our JIRA instance now, I'm thinking that was a good call :) For security and legal reasons, the ASF has decided that the foundation must have all of our *source code* in our repository on our machines, and the ASF does want us to retain essential services, like the mailing lists and primary web site, on ASF hardware. But secondary services, like issue trackers and wikis, can be kept anywhere a project finds convenient. When security and legal issues do not trump, what works for the volunteers, works for the ASF. Volunteers are the only ASF resource that matters. If the WebWorks merger goes through, another aspect will be "eating our own dog food". JIRA, Confluence, and Jive all use WebWork, and the ASF *does* prefer that we use our own software when we can. If WebWork is going to be our software, then, all things remaining equal, we should give first preference to WebWork products. Of course, personally, I don't believe all things are equal. By comparison, I find moin-moin painful to use. Being only human, I will contribute fewer hours to working on a moin-moin wiki then I will a Confluence wiki. I'm in the web application business, and I enjoy using well-designed web applications, like JIRA, Confluence, and Jive. Like most volunteers, I prefer to "volunteer with pleasure". -Ted. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
