on 1/14/01 5:00 PM, "Peter Donald" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> At 05:43 13/1/01 -0800, Hans Bergsten wrote:
>> If you have any interest in the future of the Jakarta project, I think you
>> should come.
>
> I know it's out of context but this neatly summarizes it doesn't it ;) What
> you may ask - well let me elaborate. When I first started working with
> Apache peeps it was great - I never heard any complaints or had any issues.
> It was Stefano who introduced of sorts to it all so if I wanted something I
> would bug him and it would happen ;)
>
> Then I started hearing grumblings from a few people. Usually they involved
> one of these points
In other words, it is much easier to be critical of the people who are in
public eye.
> 1. It is too slow to get projects hosted at Apache unless you are good
> friends with PMC members
> 2. Some people were trying to bully/intimadate others because they were on
> the PMC/were in the clique
> 3. Outside projects had to work to get hosted rather than Apache working to
> aquire them
Right. The ASF is not trying to be sourceforge. Hosting of projects on ASF
sites are strictly supposed to be reserved for:
Projects which already have a community built up around it and a member is
willing to sponsor it and the developers make a good match for the ASF. For
example, I don't think that people who want to release their code as GPL are
welcome here. :-)
I may have gotten some of that wrong and missed a few points, but that is
the general gist of it as I see it. In the past, we have made mistakes with
dealing with people on hosting projects and have actually lost a couple
projects as a result. Should we be raked over the coals for our lack of
interest or ability as a volunteer organization to handle each and every
request perfectly? I don't think so.
> I pretty much ignored them as they didn't effect me and to a large extent I
> don't care for the politicing. A bit later I heard even worse criticism
> about the process mainly from a few bitter individuals/groups thou I think
> most of what they said was unwarranted so it is of no use repeating it
> here. One thing I noticed was that some of the politicers seemed to be
> under stress and a little overworked - and consequently a little short ;)
Correct. I think that that is a good estimation of me in fact. I tend to be
short in my responses cause I don't have time to spend an hour sending each
and every person a beautiful email that will make their day. :-)
> Recently I have been forced to stick my head up and look around at this
> structure. I am not a member of apache so immediately a number of doors
> were closed. I tried asking people things and basically they said - "I
> dunno" to 90% of the questions. I initially presumed it was because most
> people weren't members. So I asked a member and they were in the dark
> aswell ... hmmm. Aparently management still takes place behind closed doors
> away from the groups own members ! Eek. Not pretty - another member also
> noted this and expressed the fact they were for intents powerless to effect
> this.
I think that your assumption about management happening behind closed doors
is 100% incorrect. I would change that to be something along the lines that
we are all volunteers and extremely busy and if anything *no* management is
going on and hence the issues that have been coming up.
> I have been thinking how I would do it and I came to the conclusion that
> the only way to run it is by "opening" management up. This is an opensource
> group so why not "opensource" the leadership? Currently jakarta is led from
> behind closed doors by privlidged members. You can not gain access - at
> least easily - to the resources within Apache.
Not true at all! You can send email to the PMC mailing lists and get
responses. We get *very* little email to the Jakarta PMC mailing list from
the public. Why? You tell me.
> I know there is mailing lists that the public is restricted from accessing
> and only the clique may get in - however why is this necessary ? I
> understand that there may be - on rare occasions - a need to discuss
> details under a NDA and thus outside the public eye. However - what about
> the remainder of the time. Is there any need to exclude the rest of the
> community?
Ok, so you are asking us to double our workload in order to make you happy?
I don't think so. Again, your assumptions about all this "management"
happening behind closed doors is fully incorrect.
It is important that corporations have the ability to have a place where
they can email privately to a core select set of individuals and expect to
get a timely response. That is what the PMC has been serving a role as.
> This is not the only exclusionary practices I have noticed either. This
> meeting proposed is another example of practices that (possibly
> inadvertently) are exclusionary. The vast majority of the jakarta/java
> apache community would find it impossible to actually participate due to
> practical reasons. Personally it would cost me about $4000 to go factoring
> in travel, accomodation and time-off - and a phone call while cheaper would
> still run me up just under $1000 (depends on mapping to local timezone).
$1000 for a couple hour phone call? I find that impossible to believe. What
phone company are you using?
> Consequently the decisions for the community will be made by a presumably
> close-nit, geographically close group of friends that more than likely
> share similar opinions. So how is it possible that they could possibly
> represent the views of the community?
"presumably" is a key word there. Reality is not so. In fact, Sun is paying
to fly out a couple of the PMC members as well as paying for the phone
conferencing ability. That is a nice and appreciated act on Sun's part.
> For instance - it is somewhat disturbing that the fate of ant is going to
> be decided at this meeting when the majority of active committers are not
> present. Even more disturbing is that it is the person who has been focus
> of conflict on ant and set out in many ways to destroy the community and
> rebuild it in his own image that will be preciding over the discussion and
> consequently will have a large say in the matter.
Right. A conclusion was not reached on the mailing list. Therefore the
situation has been escalated to the PMC level. I see nothing wrong with that
as that is the same thing that we are having to do with Tomcat.
> Now I am not saying it is the fault of anyone - I believe the PM have the
> best intentions at heart and do put in a lot to make it work. However there
> is the saying "The path to hell is paved with good intentions" ;)
If you really believe we are headed towards hell, then please volunteer to
help improve it, not make it worse.
> I believe opening the organisation would help this. Hopefully people would
> be able to become more aware of the resources at Apache (like our JCP rep),
> more willing to help out with boring administrative stuff (most people
> aren't aware you can "patch" the website)
The maintenance of the website is documented on the website.
<http://jakarta.apache.org/site/jakarta-site2.html>
Opening the organization has nothing to do with making people more aware of
things as this portion of the organization is already 100% open. The only
way to make people more aware of things is to document things better.
However, as my example above states...people don't even read that.
> and generally relieve the
> workload on PMC. It would also be one step closer to building a better
> community. There could be a few objections but I believe if you are not
> comfortable saying something in public then you probably shouldn't be
> saying it in the first place ;)
The workload on the PMC is currently very small. The workload of the
individual volunteers on the PMC is currently very large. Do you see the
difference?
> Another change that could occur is the restriction of "official"
> face-to-face meetings to times like ApacheCon. It would be at this time
> that AGMs/votes/whatever could take place so you get high bandwidth and
> high fidelity.
I am in full agreement of that.
> This still leaves the problem of realtime/high-bandwidth collaboration. No
> matter what you do there are going to be people who are excluded for one
> reason or another but it is best to minimize that. The only solution that I
> can think of for decent collaboration is probably IRC or something similar.
> It is still difficuly for the timezone challenged (ie I used to get up at
> 4:30 am *shudder* Monday morning to participate in certain groups) but
> usually these effects can be minimized. I am sure there are some irc
> servers that would be willing to host apache discussions. As a bonus people
> could even save transcripts so others could see what went down.
Ok, so you are complaining because the VERY FIRST PMC meeting is going to
make you wake up early in the morning? If you are really that interested in
things, I'm sure you can suffer having to do so. For what it is worth, I'm
suffering cause I have to drive an hour in traffic that morning and all you
need to do is pick up the phone. :-)
-jon
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