Although I haven't been participating, I've been following this discussion, and would like to donate my 30,000 Turkish Lira (roughly $0.02 at today's rates).
What is a Jakarta subproject? The one common thread I see in pretty much all Jakarta subprojects is that they serve the needs of people developing server-side Java applications. They may be actual servers, like Tomcat, frameworks (or whatever you call it ;) for building servers, like Avalon, tools like Velocity, Ant, JMeter, etc., but pretty much all of them are useful for building server applications in Java, and few, if any, are at all (directly) useful to an end-user. My grandmother is never going to use a Jakarta-based tool, although she may enjoy a web site running on Tomcat or receive an email generated with James and Velocity. So I agree that having a strictly defined scope isn't going to be useful (and is difficult to define anyway), and I also agree that lack of focus can lead to diffusion of the community and its value. The scope is defined by the community: a subproject belongs if it fits the needs of the community. I think making tools for developing server side apps in Java is a decent definition of what this community is about. It's certainly what brought me here and keeps me using Jakarta software, and occasionally contributing code. It ought to keep out things like text editors which, although useful to the community, doesn't really "feel" like it fits, unless it has some features which are particularly killer for server side development work. As for POI, it seems to me that the developers are certainly a part of the same community as Jakarta: their focus seems to be making a tool for server side Java developers, even if it is a bit of a niche which "smells" client sidish. And I think we ought to keep Andrew Oliver around even if POI is minused out. Kief -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
