Tom Bradford wrote:
Hi Murray,
In speaking about priorities, you hit the nail on the head. Both
Kimbro and I had priorities, paying the bills being the most important.
The company had died, and as a last attempt to keep the project alive,
we donated it to the ASF, after that, for many months, both of us
continued to try to maintain the project, living on our savings, and
trying to scrape money together however we could, simply because we
wanted to see the project succeed. But when you're out of cash, and
starting to realize you may go hungry soon, finding some income becomes
a priority. Personally, I was offered a job with BEA, which is where I
worked for about 6 or so months until it was proposed to me that dbXML
could be brought back to life, but only if it were to be a commercial
product. My love for the product forced me to quit BEA, and take a
substantial pay cut to return to dbXML. In neither situation did I
have the bandwidth to dedicate to Xindice.
Tom,
I'm glad you didn't respond with anger -- I didn't intend my message
to convey any. I completely understand that life is what happens when
your plans don't go as planned, and that you need to eat and have a
roof over your head prior to being able to doing cool and innovative
things. Very much so.
And then there was the whole divorce thing.
Ouch. Having been there, and having a continuing ugly sore on my
psychic body from it (and having not seen my son in several years),
my sympathies.
It has been my intention since returning to dbXML to ultimately either
(a) donate major portions back to the ASF, or (b) open source the whole
thing. The fact that the two projects have diverged substantially led
me to the latter option.
Personally, I care about both projects, and it would be nice to see
Xindice succeed. Obviously there is an ego thing involved if it does
succeed, but I'm just as bandwidth constrained now as I have been for
the past year, and my focus has to be on the company's product, rather
than other major projects.
Understood. I wonder how much actual time it would take to get 1.1
to a release point, from the core database standpoint. There are
probably enough interested people who could do the documentation,
the fleshing out of subsidiary parts, that maybe some commitment
from you over the next few months might keep the project alive. I
don't know if anyone else could step in, honestly. I think we've
seen some proof of that. I'm a strong believer that projects happen
because talented people make them happen, usually a core of people
committed to success. Absent that core few projects survive. I too
would like to see Xindice succeed. It would be sad to answer the
subject line of this thread in the negative, especially after so
much energy has gone into it.
Alternately, what's the chance of you open sourcing dbXML under
LGPL? Then I and others could use it. That would tend to drain
energy away from Xindice, but I'm not committed to the Xindice
or ASF "brand names" but the code. And you wrote both, which is
as much an endorsement as I can think of.
Murray
......................................................................
Murray Altheim http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK .
[...] all matters of authority and responsibility are ultimately
matters of social practice, and never matters of ontology (that
is, never just a matter of how things in fact are in the nonhuman
world). [...] just as we should not look to ground our moral
judgments in the nonhuman authority of a god, so we should not
look to ground our empirical judgments in the nonhuman authority
of an external world. -- Robert Brandom
http://www.tilgher.it/brandom.html
