why my home page is on www.apache.org

["Roy T. Fielding" <fi...@apache.org>]

> Unfortunately, Roy's site is sort of an example of what I don't want to 
> see.  However, what I believe Sam hasn't realized is that Roy *just* 
> moved his site there from the UCI servers while he looks for a new home 
> for his web site.  (Roy will correct me if I'm wrong.)

That is only half the story. The reason my home page is on www.apache.org
is because I need a politically neutral and noncommercial webspace,
where I have complete control over the content, that I can give as a
pointer to my work as an individual distinct from my employer du jour.
I need it because the ASF frequently wants me to present a completely
noncommercial face to the people that we negotiate with, particularly
when talking to the press.

That is also why I kept my home page at UCI so long, but that situation
became untenable as the school's Unix expertise went elsewhere.  Apache
is the only place I can trust not to take advantage of my association.
I've actually had a page on www.apache.org for a very long time,
longer than cvs has been on a separate machine, but it wasn't kept
up to date until recently.  I'll move it to people.apache.org or
community.apache.org if we ever decide on such a thing.

I own several domain names.  None of them are hosted because the place
where I live doesn't have DSL and there are no cheap hosting solutions
in So. Cal.  More importantly, I don't have time to maintain one.

The information on my website is stuff about me, my vita, and my
nonprofit projects related to Apache.  That's all.  I see no reason
why any committer should not be able to place such information on
an apache.org site.  I happen to do a lot more stuff as an individual
than most people (projects, protocols, talks, etc.), so it shouldn't
be surprising that there is a lot of stuff there, but there isn't
anything that would cause bandwidth waste or disk space concerns.

The tilde character is a universally known syntax for defining
user-controlled namespaces within an HTTP server's naming authority,
so the notion that the content might somehow reflect poorly on Apache,
somehow more than my personal participation already reflects on
Apache, is just nonsense.  If that is a genuine concern, then host
one of the hundred or so other hostnames we have available.

I'd be happy to pay a hosting fee to the ASF if we could arrange for
such a thing, but that's hard to do until we have an accounting of
ASF hosting costs.  Furthermore, since I've personally raised more
money for the ASF than my homepage could ever cost in terms of
bandwidth, I won't be feeling guilty about that any time soon.

In the mean time, I have far more important things to burn time on
than this issue, and so does everyone else.

....Roy