I'm very grateful to Joan for sharing this. It must have been difficult and time consuming to write this experience down. It required courage to put this information in the public, in the context of my original post which was very critical of offlist development. I learned a lot from your story Joan.
I agree with only part of Bertrand's assessment however. Here we need to separate the question about whether the large code drop was damaging for the community from the value judgement about whether it was *right* for the community. It's fairly clear that the code drop Joan described *was* damaging to the community. They lost contributions, and disrupted people's work. The Nebraska committer put in a great deal of time. But it's also fairly clear that that the code drop Joan described was *right* for her community anyways. The "strong will of the contributors to help the community in the long term, as opposed to just dropping code and moving on." that Bertrand cites were important mitigating factors which balanced out those effects. I'd also add: IBM/Cloudant seemed to have shown considerable compassion for the community members in the process. IBM/Cloudant answered the question, that I posed "why is Acme Corp so certain you had nothing of value to add?" in a way that redirected the insult inherent in offlist development into self-criticism. Best Regards, Myrle By the way, the framework I'm applying here is something I learned from reading "Winning Decisions" by J. Edward Russo. p. 176 - 180. The basic idea is that you separate facts from value judgments. Facts may be fairly easy to agree on. And differing value judgments may be fairly easy to accept. Given a separation of the two, it can sometimes be easier to find appropriate compromises and appropriate boundaries. On Mon, Nov 5, 2018 at 9:55 AM Bertrand Delacretaz <bdelacre...@apache.org> wrote: > Hi, > > On Sat, Nov 3, 2018 at 8:37 PM Joan Touzet <woh...@apache.org> wrote: > > ...In a way, it feels a bit like having had bypass surgery, I > > guess :) > > Indeed, thank you very much for sharing this! > > I think the conclusion at this point is that large code drops are not > *necessarily* damaging to a community but handling them requires a lot > of attention and work. Along with a strong will of the contributors to > help the community in the long term, as opposed to just dropping code > and moving on. > > -Bertrand > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@community.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@community.apache.org > >
