Apache Con 2008 - Take 2

Another great session in the conference was a session on the way Apache’s community is organized. Any software community has the following different approaches

• benevolent dictator approach - the basic idea here is that one person develops most of the product, providing some degree of control to other users, but all code submissions goes through the single person. Linux development follows this model. It provides quick focussed development, there is no problem with bike shedding ( a concept where infighting on development methodologies can break up a group ), lower committer pool, new input and ideas are restricted by the dictator’s interest.
• going it alone - This provides each developer complete control, crystal clear development methodology. It has a higher chance of abandonement and burnout. Sourceforge uses this methodology.
• meritocracy - Apache Software Foundation uses this methodology. It follows a principle based on Rome. Very few people are citizens by birth. Most achieve citizenship through a merit based model, by performance in society like being a soldier or gladiator. This methodology focusses more on community and voting, allowing developers to get more responsibility based on their performance in the community.

The second day also had couple of interesting sessions on OSGI. One session was on how the Tuscany project used the felix framework to convert it to an OSGI based model. The session was informative in general, but it gave a general idea that there is too much of dependency hell that accompanies the conversion to OSGI. This could be a limiting factor in complete adoption of Felix.

Another very interesting session was that given by Sam Ramji about Microsoft’s  path into Open Source. It started off with a funny crack on how Berkeley is known as the People’s Republic of Berkeley, simply because it is a huge melting pot. Microsoft has been instrumental in many open source projects, some of them include POI - Poorly Obfuscated Implementation, HBase - Hadoop Database, AMQP - Advance Message Queing Protocol, NetMon, Azure - Microsoft’s cloud computing alternative and a language called M. Microsft’s Cliff Schmidt has also been involved in a social project called Literacry Bridge project to help poor children to learn without a laptop. They have come with an idea of a talking book to introduce certain concepts.  This project can be checked out at http://literacybridge.org. This was an interesting session but still raises the question as to whether Microsoft is truly open source by heart?

Tags: apache con