Hi Rob and everyone else,
---
Louis Suárez-Potts
Age of Peers, Inc.
PPMC Member
Apache OpenOffice
@luispo
On Tuesday, 2 October, 2012 at 16:31 , Rob Weir wrote:
snip
> >
> > Allow me a spasm of frustration. We went through this nearly a decade ago
> > and it was not a short process nor an easy one nor a finally conclusive one.
>
>
> I hope it is not considered impertinent to revisit this topic more
> than once a decade, especially now that we are in a new organization
> with new participants. Remember, the "we" that did this before is not
> the same "we" that is doing it now. I'd like to think that many
> things that were difficult or impossible previously might now be done
> with less angst. After all, the project is no longer hosted by a
> company that provides its own consulting services for OpenOffice.
> That in itself removes many of the obstacles.
*laugh* :-)
Of course, we need to revisit it: yes, absolutely. I want us to, too. And I
don't want to sound too much like the nattering nabob of negativity that it's
so easy to be. I've also forsaken being more active on this and other lists
precisely because I don't want to haunt the posts with "did this-isms"--they be
tiresome in the extreme.
But some things do bear looks to the past. Like those having to deal with
prerogatives of license, mandate, property. And yes, as we are not under any
corporate shadow nor fulfilling any corporate agenda, things are much easier.
But at the same time, we do have to respect the ASF locus.
>
> > The arrangement was to have such efforts *outside* of the project. We had a
> > kind of inadequate compromise where we listed and really only listed
> > identities. But the real solution was the one that was arrived at by the CC
> > and which I've mentioned above: situating the more developed and edited and
> > thus useful list *outside* of the project and its license and social
> > structure.
>
> None of what we're doing hinders any 3rd party. In fact, since the
> work we're doing, gathering the data, building the tools, etc., is all
> under the Apache License, any 3rd party would be free to take what we
> have and quickly set up a external website to provide more expansive
> listings, profiles, recommendations, etc. And if they respected
> trademark, etc., then I think we'd be happy to link to that 3rd party
> website as well.
Agreed. However, here's my thesis, expanded from above (or contracted):
* The community is in part composed of the ecosystem and *we* here in Apache
can be (and probably ought to be) concerned with that and interested in
promoting its growth
But what is our focus? I mean here, in Apache land? Coding the application into
being?
Extending it? (Via code for extensions?)
* The ecosystem is commercial, or at least leans that way ("commercial"
meaning: does X for Y profit), and is not organized on the same sharing
principles of collaboration as ASF, though some elements may be.
* Do we have the people to manage this? My experience with community members is
that for any given endeavour a person is likely to apply him or herself for
about 6 months, maybe a year. Lots of variations, but the point being that any
effort undergone must, to be resilient, be easily apprehensible by non-savants.
(Of course, this is true of any open source collaboration, which is one reason
why documentation is always so wanted and so wanting.)
I'm not being hostile to the effort--you seem to think I'm critical of you and
the effort, Rob, and that I'm hostile to efforts to gather the community. That
is a misreading, and if my language suggests that I am like that, I regret it.
But I do get frustrated, if only because I've seen this road before and want to
see things that are actually new.
Louis
>
> -Rob
>
> > <snip>
> >
> > louis
