It really is far from a sufficient level of backing, and I have a extreme
sympathy with the heroic three who are keeping this alive. My concern is that
whilst also taking a leadership position on the expert group, you guys are
also dealing with all the design, development, testing, community relations,
attending conferences etc... It doesn't leave much left to get the important
work done of fixing bugs and adding new features. The obvious question is
'how has this all changed since the SUN days?'. Have they raided the Mojarra
team to bolster ADF? I quite understand if it's a difficult question to
answer in so public a forum. By taking a fresh look at opening this up
more you could really improve the situation, but clearly the dynamics of the
whole situation change. My personal preference has always been for small but
very highly skilled teams, so I quite understand that you don't want any old
Tom, Dick or Harry having a go. As the number of committers increases you
need a gatekeeper/QA role which isn't everyones idea of fun, but again, this
effort can be distributed also as long as the appropriate procedures are in
place. As for me helping out, I've only been back developing for a couple
of years after a long spell in management, but there are a lot of people out
there with great skills and experience, who, by dedicating a comparitively
small amount of time, all together could make a big difference to this
project. When I've got a phase 1 deliverable out of the door and hopefully
able to reduce my workload below 90 hours a week, and if at that time I've
got what it takes, I'd personally be interested in making a contribution.
As a starting point why not put together a bug fix hit squad to deal with
some low risk issues, those things that you're fairly sure won't require
major surgery? This kind of work is a great introduction to the code and
understanding the development processes, this was how I started in my
operating systems development days.
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