On Tue, Dec 20, 2005 at 04:49:29PM -0800, Martin Cooper wrote: > Some comments: > > 1) This appears to be two proposals rolled into one. One is to incubate a
Yup. And Adam responded with the dreaded "subproject" word. We determined a good while back that "umbrella" projects are bad. So *starting* a project with the notion of subprojects is not necessarily a good thing. Thankfully, this proposal lumps them into one community (while the umbrellas divided them, which was the primary failing). But lumping these two (somewhat disparate) project spaces into one seems like it could be a problem. Especially given words about "pluggable" and "no special tie-in". So if there isn't intended to be any special tie-in between the two sides, then why shove the two communities together? It would seem this proposal ought to be divided into two. >... > 2) Various comments have been made regarding multiple ASF projects > addressing the same area being OK, and indeed a good thing. While I Yeah, although that has (historically) been based on taking different approaches to a problem space, rather than simply tackling it with different lines of code. I seriously doubt the AJAX space is well-developed enough to identify very different strategies which would lead to it being "acceptable" to kickstart two competitive projects at Apache. We're also about community here, so I would *expect* that if Dojo decided to arrive at Apache, then it would go in *this* community rather than start a second. Keep the communities together and working on the space. If there is a real determination that the two think about the approach dramatically different(!), then okay... maybe two projects, but I'm a bit doubtful. >... > Personally, I am less than happy at seeing yet another large project > proposed from a corporate source (and IBM at that), along with a dozen new > committers who have not earned their merit at the ASF as most committers > have. I feel the ASF is losing its way, and becoming a repository for > corporate open-sourcing along with taking on responsibility for building > communities around corporate code bases. I suspect I'm in the minority at > the ASF, and I'm undoubtedly in the minority here in the incubator. I share this concern, and Sanjiva also agreed with your concern. A *lot* of code has been arriving at the ASF and many companies have been seeking to do PR around those contributions and activities. I've been starting to lean to a mode where (maybe) we simply won't provide quotes to third parties about code they've provided. If it isn't an Apache project (yet), then why should we talk about it? And yeah: arriving via the Incubator is also a neat way to avoid our standard meritocratic process. Diversity is also a question, and whether there is true diversity in thought rather than simply in numbers of committers. Is there a solution? Nothing objective, I'd think. Maybe the Incubator should only accept projects which have already established themselves as open source projects? But what do we do about brand new ideas that people want to spin up within the Incubator? Or what about projects that the ASF determines that it really wants to be involved with? (J2EE and J2SE to name our two precedents) Should the Incubator just handle small-ish projects that are software-granted and destined to existing PMCs? I don't have an answer, but I share your unease with the spate of corporate contributions over the past year or so. Cheers, -g p.s. for those on this list who are not familiar with my protocol, I'm sending this as [EMAIL PROTECTED] rather than my apache address; that means I'm speaking as "Greg" rather than in my official capacity; thus, don't read any ASF policy/leanings into the above. -- Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
