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> I'm curious what impact this will have on other ASF projects It might cause those committing the code, building the tests, and writing the doco for other ASF
by vorg 10y ago
> I'm curious what impact this will have on other ASF projects
It might cause those committing the code, building the tests, and writing the doco for other ASF projects to question whether their project is being justly managed. I only watch one ASF project, Apache Groovy, and it has a similar imbalance between fluff managers and grunt workers.
Although all 9 members of its PMC are committers, only 4 of them have ever committed code since Groovy joined the ASF via its incubator 18 months ago. The other 5 (i.e. chairperson Guillaume Laforge, Jim Jagielski, Roman Shaposhnik, Konstantin Boudnik, and Andrew Bayer) are all committers but have never committed any code in that time. I can't find any other technical contributions from them either. All 5 are also ASF members, whereas only 2 of the other 4 PMC members who do grunt work are ASF members.
There's 10 other committers in Groovy, most of whom are more active contributors than those 5 I named, and in my view have far more merit to be on the PMC than them. OCI, the company doing Grails consulting, a few weeks ago enlisted an active PMC member (Paul King) as an OCI consultant "to coordinate contributions to Groovy". If Groovy's governance at ASF doesn't radically change fast to give PMC voices to the people doing the actual work instead of those ASF politicians, OCI might tap into the discontent and "take over" in similar style to DataStax, or even fork it like LibreOffice.
- jjirsa 10y agoSometimes members of the PMC are on the PMC to help committers do things in the Apache way - Jim (in particular) is a member of the ASF board and likely mentored the project early on (I'd go check to be certain but I'm mobile at the moment).
- vorg 10y agoBecause it's 18 months since Groovy joined the incubator and 12 months since it became a top-level project, it could be time Jim Jagielski and all ASF members not actually contributing to Groovy leave its PMC so that the proportion of those actually committing code and similar goes up from its present 44%. OCI is ready to pounce if they don't.
- jjirsa 10y agoThe PMC can (should) invite active members of the community - there's no fixed size, the PMC can add members at any time. There's no need to worry about ratios of people committing code - the PMC is about guidance, not about writing code.
- vorg 10y agoI believe Apache Groovy implementations should be led by their technical people, so its PMC should only have people in it who can and do code, test, and write docs. Groovy's past problems have been due to managerial sorts running things.
- tonvei 10y agoDo you have a personal vendetta against Groovy?
- vorg 10y agoThat comment is from a newly-created anonymous user responding with the word "personal" to a roll of facts and figures by someone who's real name and photo can be found by following the user link. If anyone (even someone anonymous in HN tradition) wants to challenge the facts I presented, present other relevant facts (not speculations on motives), and show how a different conclusion can be drawn, then I'll happily reply to them. I believe the Grails consultants at OCI will try and take over Apache Groovy, DataStax-style, irrespective of my own personal feelings on Groovy.
- tonvei 10y agoI'm a lurker and created an account. I have worked with Groovy/Grails for the past five years at multiple large corporations as well as one state entity (both employment and contract work). I was actually surprised on how many companies use it. Also, I have never heard anyone with such a negative response to it. You can take off your tinfoil hat now.
- vorg 10y agoI've never worked with Grails, but used Groovy a lot from about beta-10 to v1.8, though have since moved on to other languages, even trying to bring Groovy-like ideas to those ecosystems, most latterly Go. I'm positive about Groovy's widespread use for builds and scripts on the JVM, similar to the way Bash is used on Linux. It doesn't get used much for building actual systems, even though some of Groovy's project managers tried to repurpose it for that. I've long had concerns about Groovy's governance, and believe that's the reason for its problems, e.g. Pivotal, OCI.