Politics at Apache
Interesting stuff on Kief's website today about the process behind Jakarta.
This doesn't appear to be widely known outside the Apache world, but there is a discussion going on (in what I believe is a committers-only list) which looks to seriously shake up the structure of Apache projects, especially Jakarta. This was initially presented as a way to move more sub-projects to be top-level projects, for example turbine.apache.org, tomcat.apache.org, etc.
But it has come out that the main driver for this is the feeling, especially among the Apache Board, that Jakarta has gotten too big to manage effectively, so ought to be split up. Predictably this has produced some defensiveness among some of the Jakarta crowd, increased by the fact that Jakarta's size (in most ways of measuring it) is disproportionately larger than its representation at the higher levels of Apache.
Unlike some of the whiny biatches out there in blogland, I really like Jakarta stuff. It's a bunch of free, well documented, organized and useful Java code. I'm not going to look that gift horse in the mouth and say "bleh. It sucks!" 'Cuz it don't.
-Russ
P.S. Yeah, I know, 'dems fightin' words... I'm feeling rowdy tonight.