Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
Steven,
Don't judge this community by this thread - we have a long history of
constructive and positive collaborative development.
Not really. For the last 5 or 6 years, Velocity has basically been a
dead project. Okay, you can point to a whole history of point releases,
but if you actually look underneath that, you'll see that the amount of
forward progress in the last 5 years is an amount of work that one
motivated person could do in a week or so. Probably less.
Tell me, what was the last significant feature added to Velocity?
Obviously, if you don't do hardly anything for 5 or 6 years, it is quite
unlikely that your offering will be competitive in its space. And of
course, it's not.
Give it another chance.
He should give open source another chance maybe, but this specific
community has precious little to offer. The product is just technically
obsolete.
Sure, It may not be nice for me to just say that, but at least what I'm
saying is true. Doesn't the fact that nobody cares to rebut any of it
strongly suggest that? And you can verify it for yourself.
What's really really not very nice is to be pushing something as if it
was state of the art when it's obsolete. It shows a blatant disregard
for the value of other people's time.
You really only see this in something like ASF because people have all
these careerist motivations for getting involved. Mark Twain famously
said that a literary classic is a book that everybody wants to have read
but nobody wants to read. Here, and in ASF specifically, you have a lot
of people who want to be open source hackers, but don't actually want to
hack any code.
A couple of years back, I was struck by something. I happened on the
personal (or business, really) web page of one of the Struts committers.
I won't say which one. It was just Struts this, Struts that. The guy had
written books on Struts, had a training course, where for some money
he'd come and teach you or your employees Struts. And obviously, it was
prominently mentioned that the guy is a committer on the Struts project.
Now, at that time (before Struts 1 was officially abandoned and they
took over Webwork and called it Struts 2) Struts had not had any forward
movement for at least 3 years. It was really a dead project, going
nowhere. But that Struts committer was really into being Mr. Struts and
making all this business out of it. But in several years, he and the
other Struts guys (and we're talking about at least a dozen of them!)
had really done basically nothing on the project. And, you know,
meanwhile, people had been putting all kinds of work into web app
frameworks. Almost any web app framework out there was vastly superior
to Struts technically.
You see, the relationship of these people to the project was not really
that they wanted to get in there and hack the code. It was about
self-publicity. To be a Struts committer, and from the point of view of
marketing, who better to buy a Struts course from than a Struts
committer? And so on. It was about self-promotion. There was no
motivation on their part to actually do any work on the project.
I don't think you see this kind of thing so much in a non-ASF project,
that's just something on sourceforge or something. People don't feel
this great need to pretend that a dead, technically obsolete project is
active and cutting edge and so on, if it's not. Obviously, there are
tons of projects there that are just abandoned, but, you know, it's
obvious. The mailing list is dead, and nobody has put up a new release
in or committed any code for 5 years and so on.
In Velocity (and Struts 1.x was this way too) you have the external
trappings of an active project, because it's important to maintain the
image that it is active. However, if you actually look at it, you see
that the current codebase is almost identical to what it was 5 years
previously. Actually, logically speaking, these projects *must* be
obsolete technically. I mean, there has to be the notion of an
approximate state of the art in a space. And people do things and come
up with new ideas. Things move forward. If you do nothing for years,
you're not going to have something competitive to offer.
The thing is that, what I've been saying here, people out there
basically know it. I know from all kinds of private correspondence with
people that they see things about the way I've been outlining. It's that
it's politically incorrect to say it out loud. Well, I'm not a very
politically correct person.
My advice is that if you are looking to getting involved in open source,
whether as a non-contributing user, or actively contributing, you really
want to avoid these kinds of projects where the people are involved with
it primarily as a self-promotion device. You want to find projects where
the people who are involved just love hacking the code and creating stuff.
There's not only that, but I think it's very hard for anything to happen
in this community because the people who really wrote the codebase, like
Jon "Monkey see, monkey do" Stevens, are gone, and I don't think any of
the current committers really know the code. So they're only able to do
nth level maintenance coding anyway. If somebody reports a bug that
could be fixed by tweaking a line, they might find it and do it, but any
serious progress to make the tool competitive in its space would involve
completely rewriting major parts of the thing. It's a pretty good bet
that this will never happen.
Jonathan Revusky
--
lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/
Velocity or FreeMarker: Looking at 5 Years of Practical Experience
http://freemarker.blogspot.com/2007/12/velocity-of-freemarker-looking-at-5.html
geir
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