I have a question for Erik.
In a comment on David's post you say:
"I just don't see the path, other than perhaps Siemens, SAP, or some
other sponsor paying people to write the code. Which, of course, would
fit with other ASF projects."
How does this sponsorship work?
Does ASF have projects which are commercial open source?
/Anne
On 3. mai. 2009, at 11.25, Richard Hirsch wrote:
I agree with Vassil in that the main issue deals with the creation of
exceptional open-source code and the different ways to build the
community
to support such code. Much of the debate revolving around the ASF
concerns
unspoken expectations - what should / can ASF provide emerging
projects. As
Gianugo puts it
The actual community building is however a task for the project
itself: the
ASF isn't Midas and won't be able to
turn an unattractive project into sexy stuff that gathers time and
enthusiasm from volunteers.
IMHO, the ASF provides the structure - based on years of experience
- and
infrastructure to support such communities. I
think all open-source projects want to succeed. There is always some
hidden
hope that the ASF's Midas touch will lead to a stream of new
developers
contributing to this success. I think in the ASF the focus is on
doing
things the "Apache" way as a means of creating this community.
Although ASF
can provide guidance based upon what has been successful in other
Apache
projects, it can't be expected to do the grunt work for all its
projects.
We could expect more "lessons learned" from other ASF projects
coming from
the mentors but the actual application of these ideas has to come
from us.
Speaking of grunt work, we should probably be considering what to do
about
the necessity of rewriting the ESME codebase as David and Erik
describe. We
can have the best wiki in the ASF but ESME is a software project and
without
a solid code base we aren't going to get very far.
D.
On Sun, May 3, 2009 at 12:22 AM, Vassil Dichev <[email protected]>
wrote:
Without trying to get into David's mind, I'd like to point out that
David's blog post was more of a reaction to defend the Rails
community. I must say it's possible to get the point across even
without the unfortunate comparison with the ASF. The point is this:
it's hard writing exceptional software. I think you both agree on one
count: even guidance and support don't guarantee a groundbreaking
software project. If success was easy to reproduce, someone would
have
discovered a way of generating groundbreaking software projects on a
mass scale.
Now I don't think that a software project has to be groundbreaking to
be useful. I have no illusions that ESME is destined to be as
groundbreaking as e.g. Rails. I still hope it has the chance to be
useful.
With that said, I hope that any heated arguments originating from the
Rails scandal are over soon, because there are probably no two people
who agree on which software is useful or groundbreaking. And the time
and effort spent in a discussion like this could be spent creating
software.
Vassil
