Re: [naviserver-devel] Why was NaviServer forked?

[Zoran V. <zv...@ar...>]

Am 12.07.2006 um 10:15 schrieb Mike:

> Hello,
>   Please do not interpret this as any sort of hostile request - I have
> read and searched all I could, but I am unable to figure out why
> NaviServer was forked from AOLserver and what the goals of the current
> development team are (why are they/you working on NaviServer)?  I am
> very excited to see the new strides toward better documentatioin and
> code cleanup and such - but I am a bit scared to sign on to use
> NaviServer without knowing why it exists or what the roadmap is.
> Please, Zoran, Vlad, or someone - tell me your motivations and goals
> both for the fork and for the future of NaviServer.  Maybe there's a
> pointer to a mailing list thread where this decision was made?  An IRC
> channel log?
>   Thanks!

Hi!

If you recall, AS forked already some years ago under the OpenNsd
name. Mostly by OACS people who were not very pleased with the way
the community issues have been handled by some "gatekeeper" persons
assigned from AOL. This was I believe in 2001 or 2002.

Our fork (15.02.2005) was motivated with similar reasons. All of us
depend (to a high extent) to the server code which means that we'd like
to have certain "influence" about the direction of the develompent.
This proved to be a very time consuming and difficult task in the AS
project as things have been questioned, re-questioned, endlessly =20
flamed etc.
It was no big fun and it was contra-productive for us to remain active
there, so we went out to build our own sandbox and try out new things
by ourselves.
Unlike AOL typical usage (a web-server) many of us (when =10I say many
I mean mainly myself and Vlad) use the server as a general-purpose
multithreading Tcl/C engine. Of course, this kind of usage-pattern is
not something of the AOL's highest-priority, consequently the changes
we need to add to the core server were not taken seriously and on top
of that, some were fiercely opposed. Well, what would you do in such =20
case?

So, as of now we have a pretty stable, in many respects improved code
and will continue to improve it as the time goes by. We will "borrow"
good ideas from the AOLserver project because there are (still) =20
excellent
people working there, and we will add our own salt when we think it's
needed. We will try to maintain compatibility to the AOLserver if =20
possible
yet this is not a high-priority issue.

Well (others may also comment), generally speaking, you will find
much less "obstruction" to your ideas if you want to participate in
the server development. There is no "Mr. Big" arround here and we solve
most of the issues in the democratic way: i.e. by voting. This is not
always easy, but the alternative is much worse (I personally know that
from the experience).

So. I hope I did not open more questions than I attempted to answer!
If yes, hit me with your rhythm stick :-)

Cheers,
Zoran