i think that links to books and articles on jakarta products are (in
general) a good thing. documentation is the weakness of most jakarta
products. it's much easier to persuade a coder to submit a patch adding
a feature than a technical author to submit good documentation. both
books and articles serve a useful purpose in allow us to concentrate on
coding.
i've heard the argument that people can find this information using
google but it may be buried so deep in the search results as to be
effectively invisible. providing links to resources serves a useful
purpose by increasing the chance that the existing information will be
found (whether directly or indirectly through a search engine).
as it becomes larger and more diverse, the ASF will necessarily need
more central control over policy. it will also become more and more
difficult to establish consensus on any issue. (take, for example, the
fate of the jakarta newsletter when it was promoted to apache-wide
status.) innovation will have to happen more and more offshore at arms
length. (contrast, for example, codehaus and planetapache with
jakarta.)
sooner or later, the ASF will probably need to create a policy related
to endorsements but AFAIK they have not felt the need to do so yet and
are happy to allow the community to police itself. i agree that a
disclaimer would be useful to make it clear that these are not official
endorsements.
but my main concern over tacit endorsements is that they have been the
cause of personal conflicts which have been damaging to ASF development
communities. IMHO disclaimers are not sufficient in this case.
maybe we should think hard about the struts solution (an offshore but
linked community resources page).
- robert
On 6 Mar 2004, at 23:13, Gary Gregory wrote:
> Perhaps the non-endorsement sentiment could also be enforced by name of
> the section such links would appear under. Instead of a title like
> "Resources", maybe "Elsewhere" or "External Resources" or ...
>
> Gary
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Michael Davey [mailto:Michael.Davey@coderage.org]
>> Sent: Saturday, March 06, 2004 14:37
>> To: Jakarta Commons Developers List
>> Subject: Re: [general] Book time - Pro Jakarta Commons
>>
>> robert burrell donkin wrote:
>>
>> [snip]
>>> i think that links to new books and articles on jakarta is useful
> but
>> tacit endorsements of particular products is a little bit of a
> sensitive
>> subject.
>>
>> How about a simple disclaimer. Something like:
>>
>> The following links are provided as a community resource. The
>> information provided does not necessarily reflect the views of the
>> community or any individual. While The Apache Software Foundation may
>> officially endorse or promote some of the information linked to from
>> this page, a link from this page, in itself, should not be cosidered
>> official endorsement or promotion. To add a link, please email
>> xxx@yyy.com.
>>
>> --
>> Michael
>>
>>
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>
>
>
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