Dear Technology PMC's
I request we postpone the conversation on ALF's
future until late September. There is a good rationale for this
request for extension, which I explain here.
When the ALF project received the original notice of a
request for a review by the Technology PMCs to determine whether ALF was
alive, I alerted the parties that have supported and contributed to
ALF. As noted in the my previous email, due to vacations and scheduling,
it took a while for that initial conversation among the parties that have
supported and funded ALF to occur. That initial conversation has just
happend. While we don't yet have a recommendation to the
PMC on whether we can increase the level of investment and broaden support
for ALF, we do have movement, focus, and activity that will resut in a
recommendation to the PMC. We should note that the PMC's notice and the
ensuing discussion has had the beneficial effect of focusing awareness on ALF
and the need to either make it successful or terminate it.
Since one of the issues with ALF has been the lack
of activity by a diverse community, the healthy portion of the
discussion is centered on working with partners to determine wheher we can
revitalize the community and get ALF back on track. We expect it to take a
maximum of 4 to 6 weeks to contract potential partners, determine their level of
interest and support, and determine whether Serena will make the additional
investment to reinvigorate ALF. To allow that assessment to take
place, I request that we postpone the Technology PMC discussion until the
end of September.
As noted previously, the Technology PMC's notice
to ALF to review its status and whether it should be closed, has had a very
positive effect in focusing attention and discussion on ALF (and what would be
needed to reinvigorate it.) Creating awareness that ALF should not
continue at its present level of participation, by itself, has
been significant. At this point, I perceive two possible
outcomes:
1. That we identify partners who are willing to
contribute to ALF and make the necessary investment. This would
reinvigorate ALF and put it back on track as a viable Eclipse project,
or
2. We determine that interest is not
sufficient and we recommend to the PMC that it terminate the project.
For this scenario, we will also be investigating transferring the code
assets (along with a committment of committers/contributors) to another Eclipse
project that has expressed interest in adopting and enhancing the code assets
ALF has created.
Both of these outcomes increases the value of ALF and
its codebase to the Eclipse community. But it will take that
additional time to the end of Septermber to assess, coordinate, and
determine our recommendation to the PMC to ensure that ALF s potential value is
realized. As ALF Project Lead, I believe delaying the discussion on
closing ALF with the PMCs will result in increased value to the Eclipse
community, no matter which outcome is determined to be
appropriate.
Sincerely,
Brian
Brian
Carroll | Eclipse ALF Project Lead | Serena Fellow
(O)
(503) 617-2436 (C) (503) 318-2017
From: Brian Carroll
Sent: Monday,
July 07, 2008 11:54 AM
To: Technology PMC
Subject: RE:
[technology-pmc] RE: [alf-dev] Is ALF alive?
Dear technology PMC's,
I would like to request we schedule the conversation on
the future of ALF at your convenience during the week of August 11th. The
original email called for a review by the end of July, but due to summer
vacations and existing schedules, getting all the interested parties
coordinated has taken somewhat longer than expected.
This two-week shift will allow us to better address the concerns that
have been expressed.
Regards,
Brian
Brian
Carroll | Eclipse ALF Project Lead | Serena Fellow
(O)
(503) 617-2436 (C) (503) 318-2017

From: technology-pmc-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:technology-pmc-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Bjorn
Freeman-Benson
Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2008 10:13 AM
To:
Technology PMC
Cc: ALF Developer Mailing List
Subject: Re:
[technology-pmc] RE: [alf-dev] Is ALF alive?
Brian,
One thing we may be able to start with sooner is a
discussion on interpreting the CVS statistics, as of all the measures of a
project, we felt the best about the changes to the codebase, in the sense that
substantial improvements and enhancements were made over the last 6
months. Our sense is that real progress was made on the codebase,
especially in the areas of security/SSO and the Event Manager, although we
also did trivial across-the-board updates to update the copyright
notice. We suspect the observations in your first note may have
reflected spot checks to portions of the code that received no effort except
for the trivial IP protection updates.
That is correct - I just did a spot check -
sorry if I spot checked the wrong files :-(
In general, however, the PMC
is more concerned about the lack of community: no developers talking on the dev
mailing list, no users talking on the mailing list, the website not being update
(for example, the most recent date on "ALF in the News" in August 2006),
etc.
- Bjorn
--
[end of
message]
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