Doug Meil, Top-posting is generally less than idea, but I want to respond to the overall theme of your message, not to individual points and sentences.
The attitude of various chunks of the US government to Open Source has changed radically over the last few years. What would have been institutionally impossible is now encouraged. It is unfair to criticize these people for being under the radar when their management told them to be under the radar and claim that the leopard cannot change its spots. That situation has changed. The code base exists, it serves a particular collection of needs, and here they are. Lots of incubator proposals come from groups of people with little or no prior track record at Apache or in Open Source at all. The point of incubation is to give them a chance to either learn how to be an Apache TLP -- or not. We do not tell people 'go away, you haven't enough pedigree.' Mentors have more work to do when the nucleus of a podling is comparatively inexperienced. Further, I don't know of any policy of the ASF in general, or the incubator in particular, that insists that a group of itch-scratchers make any particular attempt to make any particular gesture towards any particular existing community as a prerequisite of incubation. Five of my friends and I could turn up here tomorrow with a proposal to fork an existing TLP to scratch our particular itch, and, so far as I can tell, the incubator PMC would evaluate the proposal on its merits, independent of the fork. You are of course entitled to your opinions and concerns, but if you think that there is some policy that supports the position that PMC members should vote -1 on this proposal due to these issues I wish you would cite it. In the past, committers of existing TLP's have been, well, particularly vigilant in monitoring the progress of 'competing' podlings. CXF was an example podling of this effect. You are, of course, welcome to adopt that stance. You are also welcome to slurp up every line of their code, once in place, if you think that HBase could benefit from it. Perhaps needless to say, but as a Mentor-in-waiting, I'm all in favor of this proposal. --benson margulies --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
