Dave: If you want mature steady leadership for the technology, find a way to say that. I want.

Hacking Cocoon after eating too much pizza is bad for your health. Beware.

The world's funniest blogger is lacking inspiration, and we are all invited to help out.
Update why he is funny: The prevalence skeptical FAQ they offer is another work of sheer genius. Instead of comparing apples with apples, they decide to compare apples with spaceships.

Since development of Syndirella was stopped some time ago, and some people were raving about SharpReader at that time, I have been using SharpReader as my RSS aggregator. I'm an aggregator whore, I think I've tried and installed almost all of them, being them server- or client-based. It was good to see both tools supported OPML as an exchange language for my feed collection. I have one major nit with SharpReader however. Both aggregators use the IE ActiveX component to display a blog entry. SharpReader however bypasses my default browser setting (which is Mozilla of course) when a new window pops up upon following a link in a blog. Well, maybe the ability to have new pages pop up should be eradicated alltogether, which is how Syndirella seems to handle this. Also, since I often wander off browsing web pages in the minibrowser pane, I miss my back button, which Syndirella has been providing.
Ah: it seems Luke is having issues with the embedded browser already, so maybe the time is there to get rid of my two minor nits as well. :-) To add another nit: the description element of a feed doesn't show in the property pane.

I live by guilt. My life is one long string of happenings where I'm doing one thing when I should be doing another. - Russell.
Well, what can I say? I'm often toying with the idea to unplug my laptop from the network to actually get some work done. But before trying that, I quickly fetch fresh mail and blogs. Oh! Diversion!

Some people were looking for historical data, so here's some other years for your perusal. As you can see, the amount of top-level projects has drastically increased over the past years. Also, note the massive growth of the Jakarta project. Looking at the community weight of this Java elephant, the ratios really could be better, and more proactively tuned. Already, one might question whether Jakarta needs Apache or vice-versa.
Contrasting 2003 with the early years, it seems however like the newer top-level projects typically start with a slightly better member/committer/community-size balance. Jakarta and XML attracted a huge community right from the beginning, but were less successful in graduating people from committer to member - by design? The process of correcting this balance for these two projects seems to be underway, although slowly.
2002-06-23



2001-06-23



2000-06-23

When making the suggestion yesterday that the distribution of ASF members across (top-level) projects is somewhat askew, I knew I had to go in and check my assumptions or I'd be making a fool of myself. Furthermore, Stefano just posted a personal and well-written account on the value of ASF membership, with an interesting endnote:

I personally believe in keeping the bar low for committership and
keeping the bar high for membership.

I believe that this helps us getting more people inside the foundation
(potential members) but keeps the real powers of the foundation heavily
filtered and therefore highly focused on what it means to be a member.

As much as I understand his rationale, I was curious to see how this reflects upon the actual representation of each top-level project in the Foundation. Armed with a pinch of Python and the CVS permission configuration file, I tabulated some data which reflect the technical distribution of ASF members per top-level projects, i.e. the projects a given ASF member has commit access to. Relating that to the amount of normal committers who have access to a given project produces the following chart:

Which means that i.e. for the httpd project, 63% of the possible project participants are ASF members. Things to note: technicaly, James was still considered to be a Jakarta project (repository-wise) at the time I run my little script, instead of a proper top-level project. PHP also doesn't appear on this chart, since they operate their own infrastructure. What you can't see from the previous chart is the lack of relationship between community size and membership, so here's one which reflects this:

This puts the amount of people with technical commit access (members included) to one (or more) module(s) of a top-level project in perspective against the percentage from the chart above. Now, things are more interesting. Relate Jakarta and XML with the TCL project.  Or APR and Cocoon. Of course, the oldest project (httpd) quite logicaly has a large amount of members.

This last one basically shows what projects members are working in. Out of 111 members (at the time of running my script), more than half of them have somehow commit rights to a CVS module related to the httpd project. 25% of the members is interested in the XML project, etc...
Caveat: the assumption that commit access reflects actual involvement in a project is definitely wrong. I.e. of the 14 ASF members that have commit access to the Cocoon project repository, only 7 or 8 can be considered active participants. Factoring in that change would change the graphs dramatically, but would be hardly scientifical. Also, the large amount of Avalon committers is caused by 60 Cocoon committers that have access to a certain Avalon CVS module. In reality, there's only some 30'ish 'real' Avalon committers, and some of them also are Cocoon committers.
Caveat: statistics are a means to prove anything. So please take all this as a grain of salt:

• my Python skills are quite exotic, so be prepared for some massive calculation bugs (I checked, though)
  
• the dataset I started from can probably contain errors or misreflections of reality
  
• commit access doesn't mean one is actually involved
• a project's success depends on much more than the above stats, if it depends at all

Comments and reactions are much welcomed.

A very pleasant evening.

Finally, the (still) distorted ASF Members / top-level project balance is slowly starting to shift, now that Sylvain, Carsten and Vadim have been elected as ASF member. Big kudos to the three of them, of course, and I can only hope that this trend will continue.

This morning, one of our customers has been suggesting to us to take a look at the CMS part of RedHat Enterprise Applications as a potential foundation for a CMS project. Being the guy I am, I like to read the story of the people behind something, which brought me to two naratives of Eve Anderson and Michael Yoon about the raise and fall of ArsDigita, the originator of the code beneath ACS, which has been bought by RedHat upon the failure of ArsDigita. It's funny to see that, once again, perception is reality. It is also quite a coincidence to see these links were brought to me by starting up SharpReader and finding out Joel Spolsky was blogging about this only yesterday. For some reason or another, I don't happen to believe in fate a lot. Events like this happen to reassure this: there is only manufactured serendipity. Go read the narratives: they are a wonderful account of the usual mess when open source, business practices and VC meet each other in a disruptive way. It is not the first time I heard about companies failing to charge license fees for open source codebases. I do firmly believe that business models around open source should be based on funding continued work on a given codebase, and deep-level technical services for implementators. Ah! Wasn't my yesterday's blog entry a testament of this?
There's some other funny coincidence happening as I speak, but I'll leave that for another blog tale.

Thanks to the hard work by Bruno and some generous funding by Dotech, who are implementing xReporter for a large pharmaceutical company, we just released a beta version of xReporter 1.2. It is cool to see also some user contributions making their way into the xReporter codebase, such as a Spanish translation contributed by Antonio Gallardo and some Excel report output enhancements donated by Jurgen De Moortel. Amongst the most important new features and changes listed are:

• Users can now save reports and their parameters, making it easy to re-run an extensively parametrized report.
• All report paramaters and query-by-example criteria are now part of the report output, so that you can easily make use of them in your front-end visualisation.
• Reports (and language translation resource bundles) are now automatically reloaded, so you don't need to recycle the query server anymore to tweak existing or add new reports.
• Specific values for parameters and conditions can now be stored on a per-user and cross-report basis by xReporter. If you have a lot of reports that require the same parameter, this parameter can now be stored so that you don't need to specify it anymore for each report.

All in all, some great new things and various little patches and additions are waiting to be tested. It's good to see the xReporter mailing list gaining users and usage on a regular basis, and it's splendid to see people actively using xReporter for some real projects.

I went checking in the mail archives, and I was really surprised to see it has been only about 6 weeks since I was voted as the Cocoon PMC chair. It certainly feels much longer, and at times it is difficult to judge whether this feeling should be evaluated as positive or negative. Especially with my other hats, the one of running my own company with a precious friend of mine, a company now involved in a larger business consortium, and the one of being a Cocoonie with lots of passion for the project and its community, I often feel like a precious juggling act. It's not about three parallel storylines which I need to develop and keep internally consistent, since there is only one, and it reflects my core values, ambitions and capabilities. One of them is an, even if sometimes unobvious, essential modesty towards life. I often feel like these people in that cave as explained by Plato, watching the world go by as projections on the cave's walls. Not in terms of passiveness, but in a sense of humility. I live a normal life, as a normal human being, and I often don't see what all the fuzz is all about. As much as I can be passionate about interhuman relationships and community hiveminds, I often feel a sense of distance when watching the movie of my own normal life, and I end up making fun of myself when I cannot resist to participate in some obvious Alpha Male behaviour.
Over time, I'm trying to learn to contain these eruptions, and use the energy involved to focus on precise communication. In a world where 90% of communication is based on electronic means, it is often easy and dangerous at the same time to be imprecise in sending and receiving messages to other folks. While I used to be pretty confident about my e-communication skills, I know see the value of many people watching you, sometimes looking over your shoulder. I'm more careful now. I try to detach from the means of communication and really envision the person I'm talking to. The only problem is that writing mails now takes much more time. But this should be time well spent, since hopefully, it shows some respect for the message recipient.

Commercial support for Open Source solutions just got better.

7:30 AM - breakfast with the kids. By noon, word should be out. I'm off, deploying websites and all that.
Update: welcome, Gianugo, BTW! ;-)

Kimonos come in great fabrics. Weaving such fabrics can take a long time, but why bother if the journey is a cluetrain ride with people like Matthew and then some? We're about to get on stage and show what has been simmering on our stove for many months, bringing open source spirit and business sense together. Stay tuned.

Upon Bertrand's advice, I ordered Edward Tufte's The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, which arrived in the mailbox yesterday. It's a thin booklet without hard(er) cover, which meant it survived the transatlantic shipping only after some folding wrinkles. Which is bad since the shipping was quite expensive: adding $5 onto its original price of $7. All in all, I liked browsing through it, even though I found it a bit light on content. While Tufte goes at length explaining what is wrong with PPPhluff, I find him falling a bit short on positive advice. Should we drop foils all the way then? Go back to coursebooks for providing Cocoon training? But unless you're a one-trick-pony, one typically cannot afford the investment to write a proper coursebook for each course he is teaching. Also, the technology is changing so rapidly that maintaining such a coursebook becomes a fulltime occupation. I'm a bit lost on this. Although I won't be sticking too much bullet points into my presentations anymore. I'll go for full-text instead. ;-)

Seems like Sun started its own platform for hosted community-based collaborative thingies. It's a mixture of O'Reilly's weblog software, Collab.net Sourcecast, and TWiki - and I'm pretty sure many people will try to move from Sourceforge to java.net for more intimate Java-bonding. I registered and scanned the click-through legalese, and it seems like a pretty fair deal to me. It's good to see they moved JavaCC and some other stuff to java.net to bootstrap the community - and changed the license while they were at it.
Aside from Sourceforge and Savannah, mature projects will now have to deliberate whether they want to be a java.net or (Jakarta) ASF project. I'm wondering whether apache.org will still be regarded as the ultimate graduation path for OSS projects who want to belong to a greater family. The important thing is that large business start to care about OSS activities around their core technology. Whether that is to embrace and extinguish, remains to be seen. If that would be the case (although I don't think so), it's good to know the ASF is still there as a independent safe harbour.
Update: in case you want to know who the Community Manager is behind java.net, it's John Bobowicz - Chief Technical Strategist and one of the Sun execs who was interviewed many times during the turmoil around Sun's membership of WS-I.

Yesterday over lunch, we indulged in a discussion about the need for defensive programming and whether strong typing in Java still offers many advantages over loosely-typed programming languages such as Python, in your typically ReSTy multi-tier loosely-coupled XML-centric application. I was definitely sitting on the other side of the fence from Marc and Bruno, and due to their combined brain mass, I knew I really shouldn't try to convince them when not coming up with some real arguments. Surprisingly, this morning my RSS aggregator brought me, via Sean, to a nice article on Artima from Robert Martin, with a very interesting discussion following up. Grin. I'm starting to believe that XML, which is used quite often as a loose interface definition, will slowly help people to shift away from the stereotypical defensive programming approach, as John has been advocating for quite some time. After Michael's great XMLQuery talk earlier this week, I was chatting with him on the requisite of using XML Schema if you really wanted to benefit from all new language aspects in XSLT2 and XPath2. Although he pointed out that people do need to use some form of schemas anyhow if they want to store data into a database efficiently, I'm still convinced that schema-less XML is still in heavy use.

I guess I'm allowed to be chauvinistic for one moment? Clijsters & Henin in the Roland-Garros final. Huuray!!!

An interesting thread is being spun on the avalon-dev mailing list, most notably with some brutally honest notes from Peter Donald here and here.

This might be the single best thing to happen to the JBoss project. Cool people, real values and experience to back those, and the acid test to check MarcF's real feelings on the mix between open source and business. Let's see how he stands up, and let's hope these two business entities are able to collaborate on a single codebase, fostering a shared community while taking care of their respective business. A model who has been working surprisingly well for a good deal of the Apache projects, where individual committers add even more spice to the mix. I'm pretty sure the Ministry of Love will explain this as the cataclysm announcing the approaching death of the JBoss project, but I'm confident it will just make things worse for them, just as the competition between Redhat & SuSE proves to be healthy for the prosperity of Linux. Great news!

As much as independence can hurt when times are bad, Joel is right on the spot. So true, true, true. A must-read for anyone starting or owning his own business.

• http://www.shiftat.com/blog/page/werner/20030527#sun_reaffirms_no_jboss_at
• http://www.shiftat.com/blog/page/werner/20030601#jboss_javapolis_the_next_episode
• http://www.shiftat.com/blog/page/werner/20030604#just_fyi

So Werner basically had to give in. As if nothing ever happened. Being forced to live up to Kurt's stupid anthem: It's better to burn out than to fade away. Frankly, we don't see it possible anymore to further contribute in whatever way to the current BeJUG organisation. Given sufficient change in the operational infrastructure of the organisation, this might be a decision I'm willing to reevaluate. To achieve this, the existing provider of operational services to the 'user group' would need to diminish its influence quite drastically, and the sponsors contracts need to be reevaluated (which I heard would be the case already). Whether that would serve that provider of enough business interest to still warrant its presence in the organisation of BeJUG, I seriously doubt so. But maybe that would be indicative of the fact that software communities cannot be genetically engineered.
In terms of names I dropped recently on these pages, I'm not the type of guy who is good at maintaining extended stretches of bad feelings towards a given individual. I do hope however that people take their time to seriously assess any discrepancies between their own ambitions and beliefs, and what their companies prefer them to think. I've heard lots of double talk lately, also by people very precious to me, and I'm worried to see that not only they fail to see that Cluetrain arriving, but also that they prefer to duck away from it to the safe grounds of old-time corporatism.
If, by this time, you are willingly not aware of the fact that collaborative, across-company-firewalls, community-based open-sourced development of software is slowly, but steadily reshaping the entire future of the IT industry, you are either afraid and resistant to change, or are doing a disservice to your customer's interests.
Two days ago, I was still hoping things would change for the better. Today, I know I've been lied to. If Werner wants to step away from it just to maintain his own sanity, some serious shit has been hitting the fan. I'm not afraid to be hit by any dirt, but double talk is much worse than that. I'm out of here.
Update: I really dig Wiki's genuine concern to resolve this matter in a rational and productive way. So here's the deal: if the BeJUG Steering committee comes up with a tangible transitioning plan to get actual users of the Java platform involved upto the highest level of decision making and strategy planning, I'm perfectly willing (and would be glad AAMOF) to reconsider my current feelings on this matter. IMHO, that would also require a change of roles, presence and influence of their primary structural enablers.

After all the doom and terror transcribed in my latest postings, it's time for some lighter stuff:

• we are in the process of doing a first remote paid implementation job based on xReporter. Even though the initial development had been paid for, all the other various bits and pieces we added later on were done pro bono, even though xReporter is in use at fairly large companies ATM. Upon releasing xReporter under an open source license, we were hoping to generate business by doing special customizations and setting up a service level support system. Funnily enough however, we made xReporter just too easy, so that people can just install and use it, without requiring any intervention from our side (only kidding - we want it to be used in the first place, of course). Now, a consulting company who works for a large customer (think: big, thriving industry, cool reference) could use some help and the implementation of some additional features. And the cool thing is we get to release all enhancements back to the project. They'll be listed as sponsors on the xReporter website, of course.
• Pictures from NLUUG: I was really there.
  

I had a phone call with Stephan - the BeJUG chairman - this evening, who felt personally attacked by my suggested move to start a new JUG in response to SUN's veto to host a JBoss presentation at next JavaPolis. I won't summarize in detail here since it was a personal call, but I believe it's appropriate to say that it has never been my intention to blame Stephan for anything, and that our call reaffirmed my idea all this is happening because of a conflict of interests between sponsors, needed for the money to fuel user group activities, and vendors who simply pay for visibility. I know and respect Stephan still has this dream of BeJUG being a true JUG, preferably as large and professional as possible, and I hope this conflict of interests might not be intervening with his dream. Less is more.

As much as I liked Marc's and Rik's rational and well-mannered reactions to my 'over'-reaction, I received a sufficient amount of nastygrams to continue my quest for a better JUG-model. To be totally open about this, let me also put this a bit more in context for you: in my so-called position of chairman of the BeLux XML UG, I had a lunch scheduled with Stephan, founder and chairman of BeJUG for next Thursday to discuss the organisation of a joint event. Due to our different size (BeJUG is about 600 IIRC, XML BeLux 70'ish ATM), this was of course a Good Thing for the XML UG: having lots more addresses to announce the event to, and maybe some people who might find us interesting enough to stick around as a new member. Not that our size limits us from having cool speakers: one of our main sponsors is Software AG, and Michael Kay who is one of the big names in XML/XSLT/XQuery country works with them, so he will be there for us next Tuesday. Anyway, suffice to say I like to get along with Stephan, since he's a nice guy, and 'his' UG might serve 'mine' of interest.
To counter the gratuitious "Well, see if you can do any better on your own" comments as featuring on this blog however, I'd like to remind people of the first Apache Cocoon GetTogether I pulled off entirely on my own (except for some emotional handholding by my beloved colleagues when I went into micro-over-management-mode once too often) last year, and which managed to gather a little more than 100 attendees, one third of them being international peeps. Which meant securing a venue, lodging, social events, transportation, binders and badges, T-shirts and stuff, and from what I overheard from OSCOM attendees, even though that one seemed quite professional already for a grassroots event, I went beyond what they had in terms of logistics and stuff.
Now why am I saying this? To belittle OSCOM? Not at all, as it seems like a very cool show and I would've loved to be there. My point is that - given some genuine involvement - one is able to pull off quite some things on his own, and that is what Stephan has been doing for many years with BeJUG. Kudos for that. Still, after BeJUG being a one-man show for quite some time, it was decided upon to get professional community builders involved, whose primary initial target seemed to amass a large sponsoring budget. I had a visit from their fund raiser once, and I remember thinking when he left That guy must be working on commission. Nothing bad with that, of course, still it gave me somehow the feeling sponsor's targets would always be valued higher than the user's ones.
Which brings me to the question why a JUG needs to be sponsored anyway? I recall (sorry, Google nor its cache are coming to the rescue) a certain blog entry by James Duncan Davidson, in which he somehow declared not to be willing anymore to speak on conferences or shows pro bono. If the organizers were trying to make money of the event, the speakers should be paid. Being a speaker myself, I can only concur with that vision, since preparing a talk takes time, and travelling means lost opportunity time. Which brings me to Sam, a wise guy indeed, who kindly explains to me he might be interested in speaking at 'that' conference, if his presence allows him to get in touch with other 'interesting people'. James' prerequisites seem pretty fair to me, but Sam's look like a nice challenge for each and every conference organizer: how to bring a sufficiently interesting mix of speakers together so that others might come.
OK, time for some maths. Imagine we want to pay a speaker 1500 EUR to bring a nice, long talk - something like 2 hours. On average, with a decent mix between local and international speakers, let's say we need to allocate an average budget of 1500 EUR for transportation. Which brings us to 3000 EUR per speaker, and we only want four of them. Overall budget for speakers: 12.000 EUR. If we have four speakers which warrant this budget (make sure they do - I've seen quite a few expensive, but crappy speakers), it should be possible to gather 100 attendees. Which brings us to 120 EUR / attendee. Also, one should normally be able to find a venue for 100, with catering and all included, for 60 EUR / attendee. 120 + 60 = 180 EUR. Given some sponsors, which might provide internet access, bags or handouts or whatelse, you might lower this 'cost' per attendee to something like 150 EUR. I would easily pay 150 EUR to see SamR, JamesDD, ErikH and MarcF all in one day (just to name four). After 8 hours, my brain would already be much too intoxicated to lose time in exhibitions, vendors presentations and the usual other stuff they use to fill these 12 parallel tracks with, basically dispersing the attendee tribe over way too much rooms and hallways. So hosting a day with four good speakers, with some sponsoring, you would still end up with a decently priced event, totally in-line with the idea of a users group.
I'll put this up for now, and see where my dreams will bring me during the night. I'm pretty sure the variety of (sometimes counterproductive) interests of users, sponsors, speakers and other UG-artefacts might amuse my outerboxthinking neurons for some time to come.
Update: slightly copy-edited and glaring math-bug corrected thanks to Matthew.
Reminder: please do make the distinction between JBoss, the open source appserver, project and community, and JBossGroup LLC, the company. I'm very tired to see such lack of deliberation when people are discussing this subject. Mind you that - if I would want in the first place, and transactional POJOs might be a reason - I am perfectly able to build a thriving business on JBoss without paying JBG LLC a penny.

My darling wife and I just returned from a long-postponed city trip and escape-from-the-kids. Mind you that we just love our three kids quite insanely, but there's this thing about recharging batteries and all that. As usual, we had nice weather (excellent, actually), the hotel was very good and the food was quite jummy.