The committees became "closed" because we were losing participants faster than new ones stepped up, to the point where for a very long time (eons in web-years) there was virtually no committee in existence. This has been bad enough that there has been serious discussion of moving Xalan-J to "attic" status, essentially declaring that if anyone wants new releases they would have to take the form of an entirely new, presumably non-Apache hosted, fork of the project. Xalan-C *has* been shelved.
We at least seen to have pulled back from that brink. And at least one old-fart developer (myself) is paying more attention than he has in decades. So we may be moving back to a point where we can overcome the activation energy and get a release cycle restarted. I'm going to leave the question of cost)value alone, except to note that my nominal rate for as-available time starts at $40/hour. I'm looking at donating hours, but remember that this is what you may be competing against for people's attention. The problem is really the amount so much as that it isn't well distributed across users and folks got used to counting on others (largely IBM, 'way back when) to keep it going. *All* of the major open-source projects have been losing some steam as fatigue sets in. Releasing a new tool is exciting and gets applause; keeping it running and improving it less so. Even RMS agreed that while software wants to be free, getting someone else to support your users should cost; we still haven't found really good mechanisms for distributing the latter. -- /_ Joe Kesselman (he/him/his) -/ _) My Alexa skill for New Music/New Sounds fans: / https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09WJ3H657/ () Plaintext Ribbon Campaign /\ Stamp out HTML mail! ________________________________ From: Vladimir Sitnikov <sitnikov.vladi...@gmail.com> Sent: Thursday, March 23, 2023 12:04:49 PM To: dev@xalan.apache.org <dev@xalan.apache.org> Subject: Re: [request to review, and vote] XalanJ 2.7.3 release candidate RC9 You are right that payments might help. Do you consider it to be valid for the case of “getting xalan released”? Do you think $100 is a fair amount for motivating the committers? Frankly speaking, I would not bother for the paperwork when it comes to *receiving* $100. Would $3000 motivate the committers enough to get Xalan released? Well, may be it would be the case. However, what is the actual effort required to get it released? Run build.sh, push the resulting zip to the server, send vote email, agree and send an announcement? Do you really consider $3000 to be a fair price for that? Well, I do not have a spare $3000 to throw on cases like “get three committers execute a shell script” :-/ I do not ask anything extra besides just releasing what already exists. PS. It is interesting how opensource organisations like the ASF happen to create closed (for contribution) communities like Xalan, and Log4j 1.x. Both teams happen to ignore contributions, they happen to ignore fixing CVEs, and they happen to ignore adding committers. Vladimir -- Vladimir
