On Nov 2, 2010, at 1:53 PM, Granroth, Neal V. wrote: > Huh? What I should have been clear and concise to anyone who has follow the > project for the past several years. > > Lucene.Net has already been through the official process of being promoted > out of incubator status. Why is it necessary to repeat this process? > The PMC failed to respond to the list when problems with updating the web > site were discussed. So updating the web site is insufficient. > There were also a number of issues with renaming the project to remove > "incubator" from the mailing lists and web site reverences. > We should not repeat or reverse this unless absolutely necessary. > A brief pause in development and list discussions should not cause the PMC > such worries about the vitality of the project.
You could write up a Board proposal to go straight to TLP status. I'd have a hard time recommending to the Board that they pass it but maybe they would b/c as I outlined in my original email, this project isn't up to ASF community standards and not only that you basically only have one current person who is an active committer/PMC member. As I also outlined in earlier emails, the current Lucene PMC is not the appropriate place for Lucene.NET b/c the members of the PMC are not interested in .NET. George is the only one and he has been gone for the past few months (if not more). That isn't to pick on George, it's to point out that a project has to be more than just one committer to be a part of the ASF, especially one that has been around this long. So, in order for this project to get more committers, people need to step up and contribute. Therein lies the conundrum. The current PMC is not equipped to judge those contributions since none of us use .NET. Hence, going back to incubation gets you a new set of committers and it gets you your own PMC where you can set the criteria for committership (within ASF guidelines) and where the PMC is made up of the stakeholders in the project. Being a part of a project is about more than just the name, it's about the community of people who use and contribute to that project. The .NET community is distinct from the Lucene Java community, despite it being a port, therefore they should be separate. See http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html As to those questions about forking somewhere else, that is certainly something that can be done under a different name. Lucene.NET is owned by the ASF. You can take the code and go call it something else, no problem. As to what the ASF brings, that's up to the community to decide. The number one thing I think is our "community over code" approach. Anyone can throw code up on Github/Google Code, etc. and call it open source. If you are lucky, you might attract a following. If the person who started that project is nice, they might even allow other committers. At the end of the day, however, I think the ASF's meritocracy is why I choose to put my open source efforts into the ASF. It is just one way, not _the_ way. Having started other projects here at the ASF (Mahout), I can tell you the ASF is one of the few orgs. out there that can attract large bases of users/contributors almost instantaneously. In other words, the ASF has brand recognition like few other places. Again, this is just my view. I'm not going to force it on you, but you are already here, so it seems like it's less friction to go back to the incubator and graduate to TLP than to fork and try to get people to go find you under a different name. My two cents, Grant
