intertwingly

Ahh, yes, operating on thin air is our next goal. ;-)

As for the prozes, I also see Microsoft Office 11... where can I download it?

I have a different point of view from Joshua's. What he terms dependence I think of as enablement. To me, the support of the BigCos is an implicit endorsement of open source development methodology and a recognition that using that methodology to establish a common software infrastructure is a valid basis for both proprietary and non-proprietary products and solutions.

'dependence on funding' is good. no 'bigco' has dropped any stream of coins into the apache coffers. what they have donated, if it can be called that, is developer time. in many cases it's not even a matter of donating it, but rather simply being supportive of their developers working on apache projects. and i believe that very few, if any, of the apache projects would die on the vine if all the 'bigco' developers went away. in short, not only do i not understand what he's talking about, but i don't think he does either.

full disclaimer: i work for ibm and am a vp and director of the apache software foundation.

Sun has donated nagoya, and pays for the bandwidth it uses. However, the bulk of ASF machine resources is carried by collab.net.

The sum total of people resources supported by IBM and Sun combined ranks in the single digits in terms of percentage overall.

Me thinks Joshua is struggling to support his premise that Microsoft is the little guy.

Ditto on the disclaimer: IBM provides me a paycheck and I too am a VP and director of the Apache Software Foundation.

I don't think the comments are quite so far from the truth as you make them out to be, nor do I think they are as close to the truth as the author thinks. There is some stuff that smells which goes on under the covers. The jcp@ list and the NDAs applied to members for one. The most appropriate way to fix this as far as I can tell is to bring balance to the force. A C# centered community at Apache could do this nicely I think.

Andy,
Sounds like a wonderful idea. Should make for some interesting dinner time conversation at CrossRoads this evening.

The trend at the ASF is to move away from language centric organization, and move towards functional groupings.

A tangible example of this:

http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/jakarta-avalon-excalibur/csframework/

The key message to take away from this: there is nothing in the makeup of the ASF that would preclude people who want to collaborate on any C# codebase using a consensus based development process and the ASF license to do so within the scope of either a new or an existing ASF project.

Yes I'm aware of the trend. I was more thinking of a .NET-based project where I said C#. I use them interchangably because the rest of the .NET languages bore me personally. AFAIK the csframework is kinda hard to find (I was aware of it but only because of NKB). A project devoted to opensource tools for .NET server applications sounds delicious. If it weren't for the ASF politics of control I'd even think about donating my cs-wiki (the thing which lets you create source bases in the wiki etc etc that I described in my blog) thingy which is coming along nicely.

However I'd like to see a project centered on: creating a tomcat-ish style servlet engine, decent build tool (NANT != run under mono and everyone speaks fairly poorly of it), app server which provides: caching, persistance, etc.

For all the Jakarta bashing Java would not be nearly as far as it is today without Jakarta, ask next to anyone. The Failure of Jakarta is in the ASF's own collective mind.

If a consensus can be reached among enough of the .NET/Mono community I'll write the proposal (I'm a glutton for punishment, what can I say), Monada has been suggested as a name.

Structurally I suggest it would have a website like the ws.apache.org/jakarta.apache.org/xml.apache.org. It would have a PMC/infrastructure group to manage its website, etc. And each project under it would have a PMC/etc responsible for it etc.

monada: n. Describing one who would easily give up life. ;-)

Andy, I'm not sure we are communicating. Instead of a .Net based project which houses an Ant clone, the current trend is towards encouraging build related tools (for example and independent of programming language) to be centralized under the existing Ant PMC.

DB, WebServices, Framework, etc.; likewise.

Right... for example, it would be cool to see a collection Java, C++, Perl and .NET Web service tools all being developed under the new Web Services PMC. What would not be cool is a separate .NET PMC that would serve only to draw yet another line between developer camps where no line should be drawn.

Or maybe I'm choosing not to understand you correctly.. ;-)

Hypothetical Fun day at Apache:

Andy to Tomcat PMC (if there is one yet):
Hi me and some folks want to create a servlet-engine like thing in C# with a servlet-api like think for C# which also has some App-server like features (I never saw the use in distinction between servlet engine and Appserver..there just services, one gives via HTTP usually to a human, the other over some other protocol or locally)...

Answer: We only like Java and C# sucks go away...

Avalon PMC:
We want everything to plug into our lovely wonderous supercontainer! Furthermore your design does not support our wonderous IoC and SoC and lots of other abbreviations.

Andy to Ant PMC:
We want to make a build tool similar to ant that doesn't suck like NANT apparently does and works with mono. It should be ground up .NET so that it fits well and doesn't require a JVM just to build.

Answer:
Just create Ant tasks.

Furthermore, You can create those all you like but You know that every Java developer just bookmarks the Java related pages, etc etc.

I think the arbitrary social engineering will ultimately fail. The communities will develop along whatever lines they develop on. Sometimes even on personality lines, etc.

I'd prefer to see a .NET project and then as the .NET community in Apache grows, refactor it then.

Andy: Or maybe I'm choosing not to understand you correctly.. ;-)

Fair enough (i.e., that's your right). However, my experience has been quite different. The Avalon and Ant PMC's, in particular have expressed significant interest in this - and Avalon has gone a step further and actually committed some code (see prior link).

Furhter, I agree with James's assessment above about the WebServices PMC.

There were a lot of people at the Seattle bloggers meet tonight.  I love the chaos of big gatherings with conversations flying in all directions.  Thanks to Sam Ruby for pulling it together.  I managed to get introduced to most of the...