[admin] Welcome on board!

[Stefano Mazzocchi <st...@apache.org>]

Hello everybody!

My name is Stefano Mazzocchi (some might know my name for my development
for JServ, JMeter, Ant, JAMES, Avalon and Cocoon) and I'll be your ASF
member sponsor.

What is that?

After years of bootstrapping open development communities, we found out
that it's much easier for everybody if a member watches over the
shoulders of the community and provides advice for things that might
impact more than the single project.

Example of these things are:

 1) legal advice (such as licensing compatibilities, trademark
infringment, patent litigation and so on)
 2) feedback about relationship with other projects
 3) operative information (what to do to add a new committer, modify the
web site, add another CVS module, etc..)

but more important:

 - share the Apache spirit

We observed that Apache communities are unique in the sense of
"community attitude": very low flame-rates, very high tollerance and
openness. This comes from the fact that we "value" those things because
they increase the fun we all are having.

See, I'm already sharing some of the spirit :)

The ASF values the community more than the software it produces. In
fact, while a buggy software is normally easy to fix, a 'buggy'
community (in terms of attitude) takes an loooong time and energy to
modify.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I think you guys are in *very* good shape for
that (that's the reason why I volunteered to sponsor this project: I'm
lazy and this community is already very open, for what I've lurked so
far).

Moreover, I'll wear to hats on this list: an official ASF one (but only
when required, which should be almost never) and a personal one (that I
use everyday for my development stuff around the various lists).

This means I plan to actively support this project with ideas and
hopefully code.

Anyway, I did sponsoring (and helped the transition happening) for FOP
and Batik in the past. This is my third big project I help move over to
Apache. The previous two are well known to be open, active and well
known. I'm sure we'll achieve the same result for this project.

Again, welcome on board: it will be fun :)

-- 
Stefano Mazzocchi      One must still have chaos in oneself to be
                          able to give birth to a dancing star.
<st...@apache.org>                             Friedrich Nietzsche
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Re: [admin] Welcome on board!

[Tom Bradford <br...@dbxmlgroup.com>]

Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
> My name is Stefano Mazzocchi (some might know my name for my development
> for JServ, JMeter, Ant, JAMES, Avalon and Cocoon) and I'll be your ASF
> member sponsor.
> 
> Again, welcome on board: it will be fun :)

Hi Stefano,

Thanks for all of your help so far, and we look forward to more of it in
the future.  

BTW, you may not have noticed this, but we're now using the
xindice-dev@apache.org and xindice-users@apache.org mailing lists,
Nearly everyone who was on dbxml-core-devel has been automatically
resubscribed to xindice-dev, and nearly everyone who was on
dbxml-core-general has been automatically resubscribed to
xindice-users.  So make sure your mail filters are up to do.  I'm going
to cc messages to both lists for the next day or so.

I realized that it's been over two years since the dbXML Project was
founded, and the people who originally started the project have never
actually introduced themselves.  Since we're, to a degree, starting with
a clean slate here, I thought we might take some time to do that.  I'll
start with myself:

My name's Tom Bradford, and I started the dbXML Project in June or July
of 1999.  My goal was to scratch an itch that I had while working on B2B
integration systems that I had been developing in my full-time work.  I
found myself writing RDBMS mapping code... a lot, and got tired of doing
it over and over again.  Mapping to relational and storing in BLOBs is
something I had been doing for a while, and the performance was
terrible.  At the time, there were no open source XML database
solutions, and only one or two commercial solutions that were rather
expensive, so I decided to build one.

-- 
Tom Bradford - http://www.tbradford.org
Developer - Apache Xindice (formerly dbXML)
Maintainer - jEdit-Syntax Java Editing Bean