On 16.03.2005, at 18:39, Ceki Gülcü wrote:
... By insisting heavily on community building and rigid rules like 3+ committers, the ASF may be undermining the very thing it is trying to cultivate. Developers are drawn to the ASF in order to develop software in a friendly environment and to some extent to benefit from the ASF brand. If the friendly environment is diluted by coercion and excessive bureaucracy, developers may feel prisoner in something they don't understand. With his sense of liberty injured, the developer is left only with one advantage, the Apache brand. Apache may still be deemed an attractive proposal, but not as attractive as thought initially. ...
Please remember that we are *not* SourceForge where you can just open up an account and 'develop software in a friendly environment' without 'excessive bureaucracy' - we are the ASF and we have to care about our brand; if a project wants to be part of the ASF it has to bring more than only a pile of code!
developers may feel prisoner in something they don't understand
That's exactly one task of the incubator: to help the newcomers find their way into the foundation and to also ensure that they understand how the ASF works and lives ('The Apache Way'). I agree that one has to learn a lot new concepts and stuff but nobody ever said that it'd be easy :)
All in all I think that most of the already graduated projects show that this approach can work quite fine.
Cheers, Erik
[sent with my @apache.org adress due to SPF issues with my other addresses...]
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