> ASF is somewhat bureaucratic and rigid, no doubt. It's grown a lot and > became tailored to let many large projects coexist. I wasn't a committer or > member in the early times, but I always thought ASF was a collection of > projects which had at the center the Apache HTTP Web Server. Apache Tcl fits > exactly this model, and it would all the more so if we consider also the > projects we dropped because unmaintained (mod_tcl, etc). But the web server > (despite being still central for the Internet at large) is not the core of > ASF anymore. There are ~150 projects in ASF, some of them really, really big > and with large and thriving communities. I was impressed by the number of > top level projects Apache Hadoop gave birth. We don't fit this picture > anymore, unquestionable. Recently on the board list someone pointed out that > Apache never accepted umbrella projects in order to have a more timely and > accountable management. Well...Apache Tcl is an umbrella project, we > declared it at the beginning of our home page, in very first statement. > Definitely we are misplaced if you see it this way.
I think at one point, being associated with the Apache web server had some cachet. These days, most Apache projects are Java things that don't have any cross over with the web server, Tcl or Rivet. The rigidity and process and all that are a good thing for companies who want to interact with Apache, as there's a predictable, mostly friendly model for how things work, that produces code without legal issues. I don't think those are advantages for Rivet. > On the other hand we are tightly connected to the Apache web server and I > see some danger ahead. It happened to me recently to show a young engineer a > project I did using Rivet and Tcl. He didn't know of Tcl and became > suspicious of it. I could only mitigate his perplexity when I showed Rivet > is developed under the hat of ASF. Branding is a key problem, also in the > Open Source world. Interesting - what kind of background does he have in terms of programming? OTOH, I'm not exactly sure there are vast herds of programmers just milling around waiting to start contributing to Rivet if only it weren't under the yoke of the ASF, either.... -- David N. Welton http://www.dedasys.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
