Warning: IMO.

So what would be the differences between a can-do-ocracy and a meritocracy? I'm not sure, but I think the main difference will be in terms of peer interaction, i.e. community process.

In a meritocracy, you are evaluated on your merits, an evaluation done by your peers, which means it is external to you. You try to align your acts with the general consensus of your peers, and try to convince them of opposing ideas only if you really want to move in an opposite direction. Peer appreciation is of paramount importance.

In a can-do-ocracy, you do things 'just because you can', foregoing the appreciation of your act by your peers, rather as the ultimate scratch of one's own private itches. External appreciation is an optional afterthought.

Does this mean one of these community development styles is superior to the other? I don't think so - I just think for some people the external motivator is more important than for others. In the end, they are all contributing to the same cause.

Here I'm stuck again laying in my coach - my back has been messing up again in the past few weeks. The idea of having to go through another hernia operation is scaring me. And my love is in full charge of the household and the three kids again - I'm just part of the furniture. Sigh.

OTOH, that means plenty of time reading the Apache reorg mailing lists, and I must say it has been an avalanche experience. Just as Craig McClanahan mentioned in one post: this vote also helps crystalize who we think the "Apache
community" really is. I have seen a lot of honest proposals to support the further growth of Apache, but also some opportunism or just plain misunderstandings. I now don't describe Apache Open Source as a meritocracy anymore, rather a can-do-ocracy.

All in all, I have come to appreciate Sam Ruby's concise style in getting his point across even more. And I'm seriously considering to make cocoondev.org part of ASF if they feel like it.

Gunnar Berge must be a courageous man. Well done, chap.

Also: the NYT version.

Santiago and Craig exchange their wisdom on the thin line between open source and making money of it. Very interesting interchange.

Well - this is exactly the tension in our company, me being the XML-nerd and the others Java-freaks.

Bite me!

Yup, have more sex while reading my blog. This is what a reader stumbled into when trying to access 0xdeadbeef from behind some Fortune500 firewall.

(edited to protect the innocent ;-)

On a lighter note: Bruno is writing up some Dutch documentation on Cocoon components he wrote. He asked me what the gender of a 'Selector' should be... female, of course, because of their capricious nature :-)

(yes, we have genders in Dutch, and the rules for them are virtually inexistent).

It's interesting and sad at the same time to see that both FOSS (Free and Open Source) and PS (Proporietary Software) players are gathering at the same time to think about actively lobbying the gouvernment and industry.

Also, I'm feeling pretty bad reading up on Michael Kay's idea about free software. When I organized the XSLT performance event, I asked him about the license of Saxon. He compared his one-man-community open source development of Saxon with the creation of a symphony. I understand that people want to be concentrated while doing so, not being sidetracked by community quarreling while they are into deep-technology stuff. Nevertheless, Linus' remark of being hit by a bus, and the assumed lack of community around XSLTC are good examples of community issues related to OSS development. I believe the prime differentiator between good and bad OSS is community: thought leaders, court jesters, diligent worker bees, etc...

Andy says we have too many cooks in the kitchen. Michael prefers symphonies. The commercial players are gathering, so are the FOSS guys. The software economy is still trying to climb up from where it came.

Where are we heading at?

"I've started referring to the proposed action against Iraq as Desert Storm 1.1, since it reminds me of a Microsoft upgrade: it's expensive, most people aren't sure they want it, and it probably won't work."

    -- Kevin G. Barkes

If you happen not to be subscribed to 0xdeadbeef, do so - it's been my irregular grin-on-the-face for more than a year know. I don't often forward email jokes to friends or colleagues, but 0xdeadbeef-mails are often a class on their own.

Matthew is worried about the fate of the FOSSBEL initiative (Free and Open Source Software companies in Belgium), because of reference to the GNU Free software definition. Fear not, Matthew - and read closely what they say. The Apache license is regarded as a Free Software license, but incompatible with the GPL. Oh well. Personally, I find the GPL license being regarded as controversial in some commercial context, where as BSD/Apache being regarded as the Good Guys.

My personal belief is that the GPL/FSF people care more about Freedom (which is a very nice thing!), whereas BSD people care about code and community.

I'm involved in this thing to represent the more liberal BSD-/Apache-style open source developers, and I hope that it will be more of a movement to advocate the use of FOSS in gouvernment and companies, rather than fighting the Holy License War. A bit of the tension currently is choosing a name for the movement, but it seems we will go for a Belgian compromise being nice to both camps.

Over the weekend (sigh), we prepared a small Java/Cocoon project as a learning tool for a week-long webapp development course we will be teaching. Nothing special, but maybe a nice way of showing people how easy it can be to wrap Java business logic in a Cocoon webapp. Just a Generator exposing object properties as XML and an Action to parametrize the sitemap and stylesheets. After the courses and some more fleshing out, we'll put it up somewhere.

On another account, we have been invited to participate in some new Belgian organization for the advancement of free/open source software companies. Very nice idea, the only problem is that only after minutes the obligatory license discussion started. Free vs. Open Source: food for the Microsoft FUD machine!

Disclaimer: I know Dubya isn't your typical American. Maybe he was?

Lajos Moczar of Galatea.com silently announced Az, an integrated package of several open source software components that support the development and deployment of web applications... Basically: a packaged version of Apache, Tomcat and Cocoon with some glue scripts around. It's good making this stuff freely available - too often, we assume every user finds no objection in fetching CVS sandboxes, harvesting email lists for installation problem reports, etc... Someday, I'm sure somebody will wrap up an InstallShield release of Cocoon, too.

Also, more and more Cocoon books are being announced these days. I had the opportunity to co-author a Cocoon book earlier during the year, but bailed out fearing I had basically not enough time to contribute to that project. And now here I am, happily blogging past midnight :-)

Don't have much time to spend on blogging these days. Busy times, juggling time slots around and trying to micromanage my own schedule - something I'm not too good at. Time management is one of the running jokes in our company. We've all heared about it :-)

On a more interesting note, I've sent out an offer for setting up a development documentation environment based on Forrest and Cocoon. If this offer succeeds, it looks like we'll be having some paid time to further advance Forrest. I basically want to make it grammar-neutral, giving people the ability to use whatever grammar they want for document authoring. But then of course I need to think of some intermediate format which is basically the interface for the skinning system. I know I should be looking at XHTML for that purpose, but I find this a difficult dragon to tame. OTOH, it quite well describes what is possible using a webbrowser :-)

Cocoon GetTogether attendees so far: 36, speakers and ourselves not included. Yeay!

760 - blood pressure now too high, I'm heading home.

Sorry, Matthew - this must be because my first computer actually had a floppy disk instead of a lousy tape recorder.

424 :-|

Yesterday, I received an answer from Excelon, the manufacturers of Stylus Studio, my beloved XML/XSLT IDE, concerning their current lack of OASIS entity catalog support. They said they (at least) knew that is wasn't there, but that I was the first customer actually requesting it.

Strange. I've been using OASIS catalogs since the SGML-era (yup, I'm in this circus for that long), and especially for DTD-guided authoring and validation, I couldn't live without it. And I can't imagine how people working with XML Schema (the horror) or RELAXNG cope with centralized installation and administration of their documentation grammars without them.

Since we use the Walsh entity resolver for Forrest, I'd rather see all of my tools support those catalogs. Currently only Softquad XMetal does to a decent degree.