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Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2015 12:26:18 +0200
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Subject: Re: What next?
From: Werner Keil <werner.keil@gmail.com>
To: dev@devicemap.apache.org
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Bertrand,

Thanks for the reply. If you're willing to act as PMC chair from an
organization point of view, I'd say we use the chance of at least one new
committer who showed he has some ideas and wants to help where he can
already (the on-boarding was delayed by nearly 1/2 year, cause at the time
we trusted Reza would help with these things, but it seems he wasn't really
interested in getting more people to help unless they simply did as he
alone thought...)

Learning from the mistake of getting people into the PMC prematurely (like
it happened with Reza) I guess it is a good step. And if Volkan or possibly
others contribute the ideas and/or patches they(he) already proposed, but
were not picked up by actual committers either, we shall see in a few
months, if some committers would like to join the PMC and enough existing
members take their time to vote, it added simply the 1 person who it falls
short now again, or even more.
Working with several of the Groovy core committers in other areas, maybe
there's also one or the other who would like to help even if it was just
part of his/her efforts, which is what every one does here anyway;-)

Leaving his lack of Java or people skills aside, if there's one thing Reza
accomplished here I'd say it is the "multi-source" ability of some clients
(the Java Classifier plus .NET ports by Eberhard). Not that Apache itself
would really make commercial use of that like many corporate vendors, but
it gives companies and services a chance to do this if they wish. If the
real value of the project which is the data and device repository was
archived or frozen, it would pretty much mean an end to Open Source Device
Recognition.
And while we're discussing "next steps" the community notices the value of
DeviceMap. I may have overlooked it a few weeks ago, but it just started in
Q1, there's now a Ruby port on GitHub, too:-D
https://github.com/soylent/device_map It got regular CI builds on Travis
and while I don't know too much about Ruby, it seems to make a stable
impression.
This and other projects rely on the data, they don't create it themselves,
so  let's try to foster this foundation. Clients as you see in these cases
(or we did before with OpenDDR) come almost automatically over time.

Cheers,
Werner

On Mon, Apr 20, 2015 at 11:18 AM, Bertrand Delacretaz <
bdelacretaz@apache.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> With Reza leaving this project, the future looks grim to me.
>
> As per http://people.apache.org/committers-by-project.html#devicemap-pmc
> this leaves 4 PMC members, all of which have been active recently,
> fortunately.
>
> Voting on releases, electing new people etc. requires 3 positive votes
> from PMC members, so 4 members is very tight as people are not
> expected to be available all the time.
>
> One option is to retire this project to http://attic.apache.org/ - the
> code would remain available but not maintained anymore, the DeviceMap
> PMC would be terminated and people are free to continue development
> outside of Apache (with suitable name changes) or within other Apache
> projects.
>
> Another option is to try continuing for a while, and see if this very
> small community can grow again. I'm not optimistic about that, but if
> people want to try that I would agree to stay for 3-6 months as an
> experienced Apache member who can help keep things on track - up to a
> point. As I said earlier, I'm not planning on being active on the
> technical side of things at the moment.
>
> WDYT?
>
> -Bertrand
>

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