Dittert, Eric wrote:
From: Noel J. Bergman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday,
August 08, 2005 6:40 PM
As I said, it is about balance. The community that we most care
about during Incubation is the developer community, not the
end-user community. I could go so far as to say that a bit of
inconvenience for end-users is not a bad thing because we don't
want *widespread* adoption by end-users until the project completes
Incubation. And we certainly want end-users to know what they are
getting into if/when they choose to adopt a project in the
Incubator.
I have *never* seen strong user adoption listed as a criteria. Not
once. Nor would I support it as a requirement.
I don't have as much historical context as others on this discussion
but here are a few (possibly naïve) thoughts:
1) If you discourage making releases while in incubation, aren't you
effectively preventing projects that have, through whatever
mechanism, already acquired a significant user base from entering the
Apache fold (or at least making life much more difficult for them)?
Valid point here - good motivation for getting through incubation. The
problem is that we can't make apache releases until all the IP has been
cleared and the project has become an apache project (see below).
2) It seems that perhaps some people see widespread adoption as a
good way to get more developers involved, and thus as a way to meet
the community-building requirements. Certainly it seems to me that
the user-turned-contributor is part of the common vision/folklore of
OSS. Is there a subtle distinction of some kind that is being
missed?
At the risk of attracting flames, I would like to ask out of curiosity
what evidence we have that "release early" and "gain widespread adoption
quickly" are indispensable prerequisites for successful *community*
gestation. Consider maven, struts, geronimo, as examples of successful
apache projects (from community standpoint at least ;-) that did not cut
early releases. Has anyone ever gathered data on this?
3) If the point is to get projects out of incubation, aren't there
better management techniques than restricting the ability to do
releases? It seems that you might be better off setting positive
goals and demanding that they be met.
There are such goals:
http://incubator.apache.org/incubation/Incubation_Policy.html#Minimum+Exit+Requirements
IMHO, no community that has not met these requirements should be allowed
to cut apache releases.
Phil
-- Eric
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