Hi all,
Here's a thought/feeling I've been having for a while regarding JAMES,
as a user of many years (both at work and at home). It's not at all
meant as a rant, but as the personal experience of a long time user who
really wants to see this project thrive - this is how it looks from the
'outside'. [reposted from elsewhere - oops :-) ]
Speaking for myself, I can't exactly say that I'm interested in more
releases and features from a 2.x codebase with no active developers,
targeted at Java 1.4 (won't even compile on 6), with chunks of the
project's wiki (even task-related pages) last updated 4 years ago, based
on some framework projects that have been discontinued years ago... at
least that's the impression the project is making in the past couple of
years - that it is a dying one.
But, I wouldn't want to abandon it either. As a user, the alternatives
are either the above, or a trunk 3.0 version whose status, progress and
future is not quite clear either - there's a v3 wiki page that was last
updated at the beginning of 2005! Perhaps it's time for a proper
alternative? Perhaps an alpha/beta of 3, with a fresh feeling of
liveliness? Something to show a clear sign of activity and progress?
cleaning up the wiki from ancient roadmaps and plans which have been
abandoned long ago? I think that feeling of freshness would make it much
easier to contribute than the current uninviting feeling of gloom... I
contribute to several projects in what spare time I've got, and this one
always gets pushed to the bottom of the list because of that feeling of
'who knows if it's not already dead? Are there more than a dozen users
still using it? haven't seen any movement there in months, years... why
not work on that other well-supported project instead?' Or to paraphrase
the well known quote - "contributors contribute to those projects who
help themselves"...
...is it just me?
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