There’s a new feathercast, and I’m very pleased with it, because this is the first of the feathercasts that’s really the type of thing I wanted to see FeatherCast.org doing in the first place. (With the possible exception of the Harmony episode, I suppose.)

Much of the motivation for doing FeatherCast in the first place was to answer my own questions about all of those Apache projects that I hear about, which I have no idea what they do.

Clearly, the Axis2 team has a lot of energy and a lot of brilliant people. But until ApacheCon Asia, I had not the vaguest idea of what the software actually did. Now I have a general idea of what it does, and how the other projects like Sandesha fit into it, and how they got their strange names. This, in turn, makes me understand how Axis2 fits into the larger ASF.

Eventually, one hopes that we can understand what all the various Apache projects do, and we can be more than a collection of disconnected factions, but can actually be a federation of related nations.

On a related note, if you’re going to be at ApacheCon, and you work on one of those projects that always generates the comment “That’s an Apache project??!? What does it do??”, please please please find David Reid or myself and record a feathercast about your project. It benefits the entire ASF, but it most benefits your project when the rest of us know what niche you fill in the greater ecology.