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Date: Tue, 1 Nov 2005 01:43:53 +0100
From: Leo Simons <mail@leosimons.com>
To: general@incubator.apache.org
Subject: Fwd: Leadership and direction
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Hi gang!

I wrote this this morning, thought there might be a significant
enough number of people on this list to warrant forwarding it
here, since people seemed to enjoy reading it.

cheers!

Leo

----- Forwarded message from Leo Simons <mail@leosimons.com> -----

From: Leo Simons <mail@leosimons.com>
Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2005 10:14:44 +0100
Subject: Leadership and direction
To: harmony-dev@incubator.apache.org
Reply-To: harmony-dev@incubator.apache.org
List-Id: <harmony-dev.incubator.apache.org>

Hi gang!

The "open" in "open source" refers to more than the source code.

I saw a thread a while back where Geir was jokingly referred to as
a "leader", "boss", etc. I understand it was just a joke but I figured
I'd write some more words about this as some people reading along might
not fully understand the joke :-)

When we say "we're all peers here", we take that *very* seriously,
as in, the reverse of that situation would be a *big* problem. Its
just that some people have, through merit (and filling out all the
right forms :-)), gained committer privileges (and responsibilities!),
whereas others have not (yet!).

Since Geir is one of the people who has been working hard on all
this since before the beginning and is consistently putting a lot of
time into harmony right now, he's been very "visible". But all the people
around here are free to step up to help fulfill any or all of the
tasks he's been taking care of. Trust me, Geir would really really love
it if someone handled some of the tasks he's been taking care of :-)

Similarly, it seems we're getting a lot of interest and work on the
BootJVM stuff now (wee! Cool! Actual code :-)), and since Dan wrote
that originally, you'll see him answer a lot of the questions, enter
a lot of the discussions, etc. Just a very natural result of him
knowing a lot about the code and the decisions made while writing it
initially. However, its no longer "his" code, its "our" code, and anyone
is at any time welcome to do exactly the same, or a lot more. Like
contribute another JVM implementation. We (which by virtue of you
reading this includes you!) can decide where to go.

Final example. I know little about C or C++ and try to know as little
as possible about legal stuff, so I've mostly been talking about
"community" bits here and writing some emails every now and then.
That's a very "immaterial" contribution and no-one is sure it always
matters even one little bit. But I'm free to talk about it anyway, just
as everyone else is.

We have set ourselves this goal of a compliant J2SE implementation,
and if you feel there is some way that you could help or contribute,
you don't have to "ask" first (well perhaps you need to ask your
day job boss :-)), you just get started (hacking code, fixing bugs,
sending in patches, fixing spelling mistakes, translating or writing
documentation, participating in design discussion, posting interesting
links, shouting enthusiastic "+1"s when someone has a proposal you
strongly agree with, providing links to interesting bits of stuff
related to "our cause", reviewing patches and suggesting better ways
to write the same patch, writing emails such as this one, getting a
lawyer to review our contribution policies and getting back with
feedback about it, writing a weekly newsletter, designing a logo,
writing a wiki page with fun puns on the word "harmony", making the
website look more pretty, taking pictures or video footage of real
life "harmony" events and making them available, etc etc etc etc)!


Welcome to Apache! :-)


- LSD

----- End forwarded message -----

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