Hmmm. A couple of comments. Have folks here read http://www.apache.org/foundation/bylaws.html yet? If not, you really need to (well, skim it, plus the opening paras on the /foundation/ page).
The ASF (Apache Software Foundation) is an 'official' non-profit corporation under Delaware, US laws. It is membership-based, rather than share based, and Members of the ASF are essentially the stockholders of the corporation itself. Membership carries a number of legal responsibilities, along with whatever moral or technical ones that Members feel towards both the ASF itself and towards it's component projects (or subprojects, etc., or bits of code, or communities). You should read on the /foundation/ page why the ASF exists; I can add my 2cents. Legally, it's there so that committers don't get sued; since the ASF owns the code, any suit would be brought against *it* instead (this can be important in the US at least 8-). Organizationally it's there to provide the actively managed framework that holds this all together. In one way, it's the thing that differentiates the ASF from sourceforge: sourceforge may provide plenty of project hosting services, but the ASF also provides a sense of mission, community, and guidelines that help keep it more focused. I believe the very fact that we are more organized (or at least the belief or appearance thereof) is what draws both cool people to contribute here, as well as draws other contributions - like servers, bandwith, and a crack root@ team who keeps it all running as volunteers. So in my mind membership and committership are different things : members think much more strategically about the whole of the ASF, not just individual bits of code or communities. Some other random notes: -- While the members can and will decide how the ASF runs (it's a legal responsibility to do so), don't worry, we really do care about what the committers think! (Many/most/all?) Members believe that it is the communities of committers (and regular users) that make the ASF strong, and we definitely want to keep them going. -- We all shape the ASF through our contributions. If you care, then read up on the existing topics on reorg@ or community@ and respond - we have a lot of people doing that already. Just remember, if you have a great idea and someone takes you up on it, you need to follow through and help out with it - hopefully in an organized fashion. -- There's a lot of stuff that is happening, and plenty more that may happen. Lots of people are trying to all share ideas at the same time. And we're all volunteering here in some way or another, so it's hard to keep up. Unfortunately I've also seen a lot of miscommunication or people responding without really reading the rest of the email chain, which makes for a lot more worries and bad feelings than I think are really due. -- Not being a jakarta 'regular', it's a little difficult to judge the mood here. But I believe that many of the jakartaites who are participating are more worried than they should be. We'll have plenty more discussion before we decide on a way to reorganize how the ASF works (if we even do make changes), and we'll definitely want to keep the jakarta community strong. The central 'Commons' project is *not* a replacement for jakarta-commons; IMO it's quite a different beast (although complimentary); likewise the central 'Inbubator' project should *not* be a replacement for jakarta-commons-sandbox, but again, should be complimentary. And why don't they have much documentation yet? Because people haven't had time to write it up yet! I don't think most things happen in 'secret', it's just that we don't always get around to documenting stuff publicly as soon as we should - since in an all-volunteer organization, it takes longer to do things sometimes. - Shane Disclaimers: ASF Member; xml-xalan, xml-commons committer; IBM Employee; Massachusetts, USA resident; lover of bad puns and cats. ===== - Shane <eof .sig="'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in a very scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less'" "Oohayu oyod?!"=gis. /> __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Y! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your web site http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:general-unsubscribe@;jakarta.apache.org> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:general-help@;jakarta.apache.org>
