That was the question in a survey I recently took. Here’s my answer:
Open Source: A meritocratic, public, community driven development culture in which the source happens to be available. open source: Getting a piece of software for free in which there is a vague promise that the accompanying source code is vaguely useful, and that the software will remain free - depending on the developers.
In my role as a mid-tier cat-herder for Jakarta - I’m being a pain in everyone’s general direction; throwing out ideas to clean out the chaff and revitalize things a little bit. It’s not much fun, but my well-honed sense of guilt for something I’m told I’m responsible for takes over.
Disjoint umbrella projects are an evolutionary dead-end at the ASF, and Jakarta has had to suffer while I spent time in the role learning this. Now they get to suffer while I flail about trying to learn how to deal with this.
My general thinking is that a single community needs to be formed - not a collection of loosely related communities. Strong communities get nudged to the top level (congratulations Tapestry!), but Commons has been held back due to the namespace and ideology clash with commons.apache.org. So one idea is to turn Jakarta into a Java components space for Apache - basically a merging of Jakarta and Jakarta Commons into one entity.
Probably the most frustrating part of trying to deal with the problem is the problem. Individual -dev lists are used to discuss the various issues, so I’ll happily confuse people by suggesting changes on one list without that list having necessarily seen the history of ideas leading to those changes. Also, because there is not really a Jakarta community - there is not much interest in a Jakarta community. We all tend to think that our subproject is doing okay the way things are.
My aim is to spend this year trying to get consensus on small steps that deal with the problem. Such as removing SVN restrictions, unifying conversations on a topic onto one list (still have multiple lists though), coming up with a process for project inactivity.
And to conclude the night’s blogging - a ‘whoops’. I’m heading down to EclipseCon in a few weeks to show off Jakarta Commons to anyone who is listening, but have only just got around to sorting out the flight and accomodation - unusually non-paranoid planning on my part. Both hotels are sold out, so tomorrow I get to phone the motel 10 blocks away to see how they are for space.
And then I need to buy a plane ticket 
Having a blogging night it seems.
I use Gmail for non-authoritative email - that is, lots and lots of mailing lists. Maybe 65 or so at a quick random count. 1.2G used out of 2.7G. At some point I’ll run out of space, or Google might continue to expand it. However, those numbers are very tiny. My private email has 350M used with 60G left.
The interface isn’t very good. It insists on experimenting with tags when folders already work damn well - yes tagging is cool, switch your file system from a hierarchical system to a tagged one and let me know how it goes. It’s crap at deleting - I have to delete in blocks of 100 and then I have to really delete in blocks of 100 from the trash. It’s slow, fast for a web user interface, but slow for something actually on my machine. It’s big and heavy on the browser - which I suspect means that it finds memory bugs quicker, they seem to die more often.
I moved to Gmail because visualizing those many mailing lists was getting hard to do in pine. I don’t want to trawl through the lists reading every mail, I just want to scan the subjects and pick the ones I like. All this suggests that I might need other options - news client software via NNTP using gmane.org; though I wonder if I’m going to find something with the bits I’ve gotten used to in Gmail, starring conversations is a good idea, though it doesn’t seem to work well enough in Gmail - simply because the menu option doesn’t show that there are unread emails in the Starred label.
Another option is the forum approach. Nabble.com is an option there, but it has bits missing; I can’t delete entries, setup filters to delete entries, it has a rating system when I want a star/bookmark system - I don’t care about telling other people what the interesting options are, I want to manage them as if I owned them. In reality I doubt it would delete them, rather it would just delete the pointer in my account etc etc. I doubt if it saves the messages I sent specially (though that would be easy to add), but most importantly, I can’t email forward entries to other addresses, reply privately or cross-post - the things I’d want from an email client.
So what do I want? I want a mailing list client. Something that speaks email, but is prepared to step back and view things from afar. Filter based on [xxx], collate certain emails into periodic reports, let me mark threads as ignorable, alert me when a thread changes, definitely alert me if my name appears (or other chosen search terms), and when I email a list, it uses the user who is subscribed to that list - I won’t have to choose.
Now, I ask you. Is that too much to ask?
Commons Make - You’ve just downloaded that project and now you have to compile/build/install it - but what kind of project is it? Maven? Ant? Shell? Don’t you wish there was something simpler? Commons Make will take SCM urls and do its upmost to build a jar for you.
Commons Spanned-X - So many ways to parse XML, from the plethora of different DOM/SAX parsers, to all these new Johnny-come-latelies with their arrogant demands to be THE ONE. Commons Spandex will stretch over these libraries to give you a common interface. Of course it’ll also provide a reflective API to allow you to access the underlying implementation if need be.
Commons Crustacean - Provides an API so that you don’t have to worry if you’re using Bash, Zsh or Tcsh. No support for Ksh though, those users need to migrate to a real shell.
Commons DateThingy - A Date parser that can handle the difference between US and UK parsers via inference, access to the HttpRequest (or other Commons Requestable) and a distance variable dictating how far away the date is expected to be.
Commons REST - Generic REST API so that we’re not stuck with just HTTP.
Commons Dynamo - A dynamic API invocation system, so that you can hook Commons APIs up via the same interface.
Commons Uncommon - a module in which individuals can publish their personal components, only SNAPSHOT versions allowed.
Commons Spec - auto-generate a spec jar without the insanity of Sun licensing (why use an encumbered license on something that you want everyone to use?)
Roller 2.1 is out now, so I just updated our blogs. As far as a casual blogger is concerned, this means you get:
Roller’s doing well in the Apache Incubator, personally I think it’s only not at roller.apache.org because it has dependencies which are still distributed (LGPL and BCL) that encumber the user with more than the Apache License does - we’re still discussing how to handle these at the ASF.
We’ve been in Seattle for about 4 days or so now. We arrived on Saturday afternoon, rented a car, found our apartment for the next month, bathed the child and fell asleep. On Sunday we found a nearby supermarket, stocked up on food while wincing at the 50% increase over a Kentucky shop and checked out an apartment. Three days of apartment checking later, it’s still the top one on our list so we’ve gone ahead and let them know we’re interested and this weekend we’ll go organize paperwork etc. Bit odd to not be being pushed into making a commitment asap - gives you the feeling nowadays that something is wrong with the place. Maybe we’ve just found a keeper.
Each morning I’ve been walking to work. It’s a thirty minute walk across Seattle - which seems to have two characters, a sparkley shopping half and a grubby half. It’s also built on a hill, walking from 3rd Street to 1st Street is a very impressive incline - so as I figure things out I start to walk to work in a curve to circum-navigate the hill, rather than directly. Suddenly I find myself wanting to have GPRS set up so I can monitor the route I am taking. After four years sitting on my backside while a car takes me to work; it’s exhausting to do this walk twice a day, and yet a lot of fun. Sadly the apartment we’re going for will involve a bus ride - no walking.
Nathan has not taken to the timezone shift yet. He’s also probably not too happy at being dragged around town by his mother each day - after having had two months in which we were both home and I would pop up from the basement for a quick 5 minute play every now and then. However even when whiney, he continues to be a delight. Tonight’s desire to sit and code was destroyed when I decided it would be nice to put Nathan to sleep - something which always ends with the two of us lying asleep on our bed.
Work is busy, but going well. Generally I’m spending my time monitoring the output of tools that monitor various open source project bug trackers (the SASH ones), backporting fixes, becoming the build-manager (apparantly not everyone thinks build management is cool so the job remains vacant) and helping out with general “how to approach the community” questions on issues that pop up. It’s cool that what was once a hobby of no importance to my employers is now a major factor on my resume and day to day work, but I still need to work on getting real overlap between my Apache time and my work time. Currently I’m just getting more involved in projects I hovered on the periphery of before; nice but not an efficiency improvement.
We have a full cable package in this short term apartment. It was quite fun to show Nathan football again - he liked to point out the ball as it flew around then got bored when it went off-screen. An important lesson to the people running football - the players, the teams, the egos, the money; none of it is important compared to the ball. Apart from that it’s just been a case of watching Stargate repeats and on Friday the new Stargate and Battlestar Galactica episodes. So I continue to be in favour of not wasting on money on cable TV packages. Given that Seattle weather is pretty predictable, it’s tempting to try the broadcast channels out - but maybe the hilly nature makes the signals crap.
Generally life is exciting, but it’s easy to miss the old boring safe routine.
