Preamble:
First off, let me take this opportunity to thank each and every one of you
who has contributed to making Tomcat the great product that it is. I know
that gets said sometimes, but not nearly enough.
I have been a longtime lurker and occasional poster to this list. As a Java
developer who has just recently begun poking around in the source code, I am
not yet qualified to make any technical comments on Tomcat whatsoever,
although I will be soon enough. I am also torn on the current disagreement
that has apparently led to Costin's departure, as I think that both sides
have some valid points. In short, I am in no position to offer answers or
opinions. So instead, I feel like weighing in with my genuine feelings about
losing such a fervent and talented developer as Costin. So like a child
acting out during a rather messy parental divorce, here's my shot from the
middle.
(Please forgive the length of this, but hey, the subject did say "letter,"
so you were free to ignore it if you had actually felt like doing some real
work.)
Costin:
You have my deepest thanks for the sheer volume of work you contributed to
the product that runs every one of the applications I write for my
customers. As a professional developer, I just want to add my voice to the
countless other end users of the tomcat product who have posted here in
thanks for your attention to the as-yet only major release of the product.
>From those of us on the outside looking in, who aren't really involved in
+1's and PMC's and "revolutions," your efforts are appreciated tremendously.
Your steadfast desire to see the 3.x product finished as you had envisioned
it speaks to every self-respecting developer. You are underappreciated by
some of those fellow developers IMHO, but your users thank you. And in the
end, isn't that who are you writing the code for anyway? I think more people
than you probably realize have much love, bro.
Craig:
You have always struck me as a fair and thoughtful project lead. I admire
your ability to put your own political beliefs aside for the good of the
project, as was evident when you switched from Catalina to work full-time on
3.2 bugfixes. Tomcat 3.2 was a better product for it, and we users owe you
many thanks as well. In fact, as a servlet coder from back in the early days
of Apache JServ, I owe you a great deal of thanks for your longstanding work
in the field. As I said, I have no value judgement for 3.x vs. 4.x, but in
the end I understand why a parting of the ways was probably inevitable. If I
might take slight exception with some of your recent comments, however (hey,
you knew it was coming, right :-) ...
> But, prospective "3.3" users should also be aware ... this time, if it
ever did
> get released, I'm not going to be there to clean up Costin's bugs (as I
had to do
> on both 3.1 and 3.2). I've got better things to do.
This is precisely the kind of accusatory attitude and low-civility discourse
that a) is about to get Jon a tounge-lashing below, and b) gives me pause
about getting involved with this project at the moment. You two are (were)
arguably the biggest contributors, are usually quite pleasant, and have
respected each other for over a year! You realize that since both of you are
my role models, this kind of talk will probably stunt my emotional
development or something. Oh well, like they say, when the gods fight, it's
always the little people that get stepped on.
> By the way, Tomcat 4.0 will be the web container in the next release of
the Java2
> Enterprise Edition (J2EE) reference implementation. As such, it is
receiving the
> benefit of extensive testing within Sun, in addition to all the testing
done by
> the open source community.
On a serious note, that offends my open source sensibilities. I can
appreciate your point about the additional testing, but I think the open
source community by itself has ample testers, and "official sponsorship" as
an argument always makes me a little uncomfortable. Anyway, just my $0.02 on
that.
Jon:
You seem to irritate virtually every developer you bump into, including
myself. For some reason there is always at least one of your kind on every
dev list I subscribe to. You do not make your points respectfully, and as a
result your points are usually lost in your demeanor. You see, I don't know
whether your ideas are right or wrong, but when you phrase you answers in
the form of pure acid, I just can't bring myself to care.
In a previous post, which I apologize for not being able to locate in the
archives and therefore quote directly, you allude to playing the bad guy for
the sake of getting things accomplished. You seem to wear abrasiveness as
some sort of mantle, when in reality it is a rather large albatross. For the
curious: "you just don't get it" and "HELLO! DUHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!" are dripping
with arrogance and self-love. Contrary to your rather bizzare theory, this
is actually counterintuitive. Case in point: Although I believe very
strongly in Tomcat, I will not become involved in any meaningful way.
Reason: I do not tolerate such foolishness very well (which is an admitted a
character flaw), and I do not wish to strain either the patience of the list
or my relationship with the community with the crucifying responses you
would receive if ever you were to presume to address me in the manner
displayed above.
If I wanted to play flame games I would go hit the script kiddie newsgroups.
Like most people here, however, I would rather collaborate on some great
code with people who can at least muster some semblance of respect when
addressing me. Yes, as a previous poster noted, you *are* alienating
developers. As a result, I will probably follow Costin to SourceForge for
what will definitely be a better working relationship. If the civility in
this list ever reaches an acceptable level, starting with you, I would
actually love to contribute to both projects.
All of this is not intended to start a flame war, simply to stress to you
(since you seem to be of exactly the opposite opinion) that your behavior
_does_ have negative consequences to the project. I have to wonder how many
other list lurkers there are besides me who are unwilling to submit
themselves to your brand of vitriol.
You can reply to this or not, Jon. As I said it is not intended to start a
flame war, I just thought you might want a would-be contributor's opinion.
And based on some of the other posts I've seen, I'm apparently not the only
one who is "strongly -1" on the extraneous attitude.
Regards, all ...
- Christopher
