[Spread-users] Public CVS?

[Theo Schlossnagle]

On Tuesday, September 18, 2001, at 01:13  PM, Jon Stevens wrote:

> on 9/18/01 9:44 AM, "Theo Schlossnagle" <jesus at omniti.com> wrote:
> Most of the documentation I have is based on experience of having 
> helped run
> large scale OSS projects since ~1996. Originally, Apache Jserv was not

I assume you mean that your opinion is based on experience and not 
documentation?  I don't see any documentation "based on experience."

> < .. snip .. >
> project under Jakarta. Needless to say, I think that personally dealing 
> with
> thousands of users over many years is worth more than any RFC or 
> published
> documentation.

That is the whole problem.  Your experiences are yours.  RFC and 
published documentation are consumable by the masses.

> I haven't read this book yet, but I bet it will be good...
> <http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/09/13/1519222>

Thanks, I will have a look.

> I don't agree with everything he says, but this is a pretty basic 
> example
> from a well read paper:
> <http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-
> bazaar/x135.
> html>

I have read this.  I thought it was an excellent book.  I agree with 
almost all of his views except that they can be applied so generally to 
all OSS and other software projects/products.

And yes.  I believe there an excerpt on fetchmail in there... so your 
experiences are documented somewhat.  You also must realize that Spread 
is a very very different construction than something like fetchmail.  
Spread is a tested and working system with an extremely evolved 
architecture.  I would image that the creators never intended on 
releasing it open source when they started it.

The reason that I so readily embrace Spread as an open source project 
(even with the silly apply for CVS policy) is that much of the 
industrial work that I do relies on Spread and I can ensure that it has 
a future.  There is no comparable OSS product to Spread -- I have looked.

I know that the THOUSANDS of lines of code that I have contributed and 
were incorporated into the existing Spread system don't even show up on 
the big picture of time and energy that went into creating what was 
already there.  Frankly, I am just happy that it has been released under 
the license that it was :-)  Maybe I'm a simpleton.

> This one, I helped write:
> <http://jakarta.apache.org/site/guidelines.html>

I have my own issues with the Jakarta project (mostly with Tomcat) that 
I will not air on this list.  None of which I blame on you or the other 
Jakarta developers.  So, I now take everything from the Jakarta project 
with a grain of salt.

> Commits or downloads. Why do they have to be tied to specific individual
> people?

I don't know.  Why not?

--
Theo Schlossnagle
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