Michael Davey wrote:
Jakarta is the *brand*. It defines itself. Jakarta brand development. A brand can give a unique identity and grouping to an otherwise disparate and commodity range of goods and services.
Apache is a brand too, and, IMHO, a much stronger brand than Jakarta.
I believe Jakarta distracts people from the fact that everything we do here is on behalf of the Apache Software Foundation. We are not "Jakarta Committers", we are "Apache Committers". We use the Apache License, package our product for apache.org, check code into cvs.apache.org, and donate every line to the Apache Software Foundation.
We are apache committers - but each apache committer is also "httpd committer" or "cocoon committer" or "jakarta comitter".
You can't deny that HTTPD has a community of people, just like jakarta - which is not identical with the whole ASF ( even if ASF was originally the HTTPD community ).
ASF is a collection of communities - some bigger, some smaller. Jakarta happens to be the bigger - and as long as you believe we are "jakarta committers", you should also accept that jakarta _is_ a community just like httpd.
A lot of people seem to have a problem with us feeling part of "jakarta" - and at the same time denying that jakarta is a community.
IMO TLP is very closely related to "community" - in the sense that each TLP is or should be centered around a community.
I realize that there are people who have romantic notions about "Jakarta" and like to talk about preserving Jakarta for Jakarta's sake. But for the life of me, I can't see why. For me, it's always been about the codebase and its community. If a product I use is hosted at SourceForge, I work at SourceForge. If it's hosted at Jakarta, I work at Jakarta. If it's a top-level ASF project, then I work there. I go where my community lives; and my community is centered on a codebase, not a hostname.
I think it's not about codebase or hostname, but it is about community.
As long as a project choose to remain part of jakarta - and refer to themself as "jakarta committer" - they are part of the jakarta community, just like an HTTPD committer is part of the httpd community.
And a community with people from struts + tomcat + velocity + taglibs + cactus + POI + .... ( whatever projects choose to remain part of jakarta ) is IMO stronger that N separate TLPs, sourceforge-style.
There are people who have called Jakarta a "jewel". I'd agree that Cactus is a jewel, as is Lucene, and Velocity, and all the other *communities* we've built around our codebases. But Jakarta is not the jewel, at best it's a jewelry box.
The fact that people from velocity, struts, poi, etc are all involved in this discussion about jakarta should mean that jakarta is a bit more than a sourceforge.
All along, there have been people who envisioned a "Jakarta community". But, what's the point of that, really? We already have the Apache community and the open source community. Why do we need another community within a community? What's the point of another layer of indirection?
And if each codebase in jakarta becomes a TLP - wouldn't this be another level if indirection ?
Apache community and open source community are all great - but both of them are one way or another an "umbrella" for multiple smaller communities.
ASF is the real "umbrella" - not jakarta.
Jakarta has multiple codebases and it started as an umbrella - but we managed to act and be perceived as a community. Not a perfect community.
And look what's happening with logging: Now that it's a TLP, they are bringing-in the various Log4J compatibles. Now, there can be one Apache logging project serving every platform. That's community-building!
Is logkit included in the logging TLP ? What about commons-logging ?
I agree with you that the logging TLP does define a community ( just like jakarta or httpd ). It's a separate PMC bringing togheter different codebases and people.
It remains to be seen if log4j as a TLP will be better than log4j as part of jakarta. There are plenty of TLPs - like apache-commons - that
don't seem to be much better than sub-projects like jakarta-commons.
Costin
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