On Dec 4, 2003, at 7:58 PM, Murray Altheim wrote:
Ryan Hoegg wrote:
I hate to be a wet noodle or a wet blanket (or, now living in England, anything wet), but I've been watching this project since its days as dbXML, and while there are now and then a few people who pipe up as interested, and even rarer a few who contribute time and code, I look at that mythical number of 747,939 registered SourceForge users and wonder if there are truly businesses and people banking on native XML databases, how we can't seem to locate even a handful willing and able to put time into Xindice. Unless everyone is going to commercial DB, which is hard to imagine.
Well, I don't think it is that simple. Databases are an entirely different class of project over the typical Sourceforge effort and are intimidating to a lot developers. Rightfully so too. The Xindice project has always been able to find people to work on the periphery, but we've never been able to fill in the hole around the database core created when Tom was forced to move on. Having that hole kills the progress of the project overall as there's no momentum on any major issues and the people drift away. I personally tried to fill that hole, but I've never considered myself a "hardcore" programmer and that was proven by my lack of progress in the area.
The thought of having the project die is very disheartening to me, as Tom mentioned, we both really suffered from our desire to continue working on Xindice. Unfortunately, we have to face the fact that databases in general are hard, and there just aren't a lot of people who can tackle them. Most of the larger Apache projects have people paid to work on them, Xindice hasn't had that luxury.
As I said previously, a project lives or dies by having a handful of (or even one!) truly committed and talented people involved. I've got a project of my own right now that has taken up the lion's share of my time (like, night and day) for the past two years, so I do speak from some experience. If Xindice had one or two people similarly committed to its success, it would succeed. It won't simply by having people wanting it, or "banking on it". There needs to be some people *working* on it.
That's true, but... it's hard to have that level of commitment to a very difficult project that you didn't create. This is why I suggested that maybe it should be open for a new start. Whether that can or would succeed I don't know, but without anyone even willing to try it doesn't matter.
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
Kimbro Staken Software, Consulting and Writing http://www.xmldatabases.org/ Apache Xindice native XML database http://xml.apache.org/xindice XML:DB Initiative http://www.xmldb.org
