Hi gang! I wrote this this morning, thought there might be a significant enough number of people on this list to warrant forwarding it here, since people seemed to enjoy reading it.
cheers! Leo ----- Forwarded message from Leo Simons <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ----- From: Leo Simons <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2005 10:14:44 +0100 Subject: Leadership and direction To: harmony-dev@incubator.apache.org Reply-To: harmony-dev@incubator.apache.org List-Id: <harmony-dev.incubator.apache.org> Hi gang! The "open" in "open source" refers to more than the source code. I saw a thread a while back where Geir was jokingly referred to as a "leader", "boss", etc. I understand it was just a joke but I figured I'd write some more words about this as some people reading along might not fully understand the joke :-) When we say "we're all peers here", we take that *very* seriously, as in, the reverse of that situation would be a *big* problem. Its just that some people have, through merit (and filling out all the right forms :-)), gained committer privileges (and responsibilities!), whereas others have not (yet!). Since Geir is one of the people who has been working hard on all this since before the beginning and is consistently putting a lot of time into harmony right now, he's been very "visible". But all the people around here are free to step up to help fulfill any or all of the tasks he's been taking care of. Trust me, Geir would really really love it if someone handled some of the tasks he's been taking care of :-) Similarly, it seems we're getting a lot of interest and work on the BootJVM stuff now (wee! Cool! Actual code :-)), and since Dan wrote that originally, you'll see him answer a lot of the questions, enter a lot of the discussions, etc. Just a very natural result of him knowing a lot about the code and the decisions made while writing it initially. However, its no longer "his" code, its "our" code, and anyone is at any time welcome to do exactly the same, or a lot more. Like contribute another JVM implementation. We (which by virtue of you reading this includes you!) can decide where to go. Final example. I know little about C or C++ and try to know as little as possible about legal stuff, so I've mostly been talking about "community" bits here and writing some emails every now and then. That's a very "immaterial" contribution and no-one is sure it always matters even one little bit. But I'm free to talk about it anyway, just as everyone else is. We have set ourselves this goal of a compliant J2SE implementation, and if you feel there is some way that you could help or contribute, you don't have to "ask" first (well perhaps you need to ask your day job boss :-)), you just get started (hacking code, fixing bugs, sending in patches, fixing spelling mistakes, translating or writing documentation, participating in design discussion, posting interesting links, shouting enthusiastic "+1"s when someone has a proposal you strongly agree with, providing links to interesting bits of stuff related to "our cause", reviewing patches and suggesting better ways to write the same patch, writing emails such as this one, getting a lawyer to review our contribution policies and getting back with feedback about it, writing a weekly newsletter, designing a logo, writing a wiki page with fun puns on the word "harmony", making the website look more pretty, taking pictures or video footage of real life "harmony" events and making them available, etc etc etc etc)! Welcome to Apache! :-) - LSD ----- End forwarded message ----- --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
