As I sit here writing about Apache, I look up at the card display next to me and see the following:

“May your days be good and long upon the earth.” (Apache blessing)

Nice.

So, after having to give up running my own business, because there weren’t enough people out there who wanted Apache training, and who had the budget to pay for it, now I have 4 full training classes lined up, and it’s inconvenient because I have to take time off of work to go do them. And I find myself having to decide whether I think it’s sustainable – enough so that I should, say, quit my job, or go onto a part-time, contractor kind of basis, and focus on the business again.

It’s pretty scary – if I do, and if I don’t. It’s what I want to be doing, but the uncertainty is a little alarming. Being so reliant on finding 4 or 5 warm bodies to fill seats for a week, is a little undertain one month to another. Now, if we had a good salesperson …

Dunno, it’s a lot to think about.

Day one of training, and I think it went pretty well. I’ve got 5 students, and most of them have some Unix experience.

The training machines are Solaris, which is causing some problems, all related to my ignorance of Solaris. Bunch of stuff in /opt/sfw/ that I expect to be in my path already.

Once more, I praise Drury. Drury is the best hotel I have ever stayed at for keeping the business traveller in mind. Free broadband Internet in every room. Free breakfast. Free drinks from 5:30 to 7 every evening. I suppose it might be a little more expensive, but it is worth it.

OK, Palm battery is dying, and I need to go find food.

After reading Andrew’s post a number of times, and reading various comments on it, I gotta say, yes, it appears that we are experiencing two different cities. It’s amazing to me how people can experience the same things, and come away from them with such different impressions.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I may be misunderstanding what Andrew is saying. I have a hard time differentiating between when he is saying something sarcastically, and thus it’s the opposite of what he thinks, and when he’s saying what he really thinks, and it only seems sarcastic because … um … well, I’m not sure.

For example, when Andrew proposed, and set up, the Apache wiki, nobody claimed, for example, that it would destroy the community, that the sky would fall, or that we would get sued out of existence. There was concern that things would be put there that would be embarassing and unsavory. I don’t recal anyone saying we’d get sued for this. I could, of course, be wrong, but it seemed that most of the vitriol in the discussion came from hyperbole on Andrew’s part, rather than from actual remarks made.

But, as I progress through the article, I find myself wondering if we are indeed talking about the same ASF. It’s sad that his experience has been so different from mine.

But when I got to the bit about Lion Kimbro, I found myself frustrated and baffled. Who is this guy? The links go nowhere. Does he want to participate in the HTTPd documentation project? What do these cryptic remarks about wikis have to do with anything at all? And did Andrew really send this guy such a snide, counterproductive remark, engineered to scare him off? Why would he have done that?

I gotta say, Andrew, if you feel ostracised, it has nothing to do with the fact that you are associated with JBoss, and everything to do with the fact that you always feel the need to be so amazingly beligerent in your attacks of things, and come across as so intent to frame yourself as the trodden-down underdog.

I found almost every one of your complaints to be either grossly overstated, or so completely off target as to be laughable. Your complaints about the incubator are aimed at a previous incarnation of it, and not what it has evolved into. Your claims about private mailing lists are simply false. And chasing off a potential contributor to the HTTPd documentation project is really not appreciated.

I have tried, repeatedly, to understand where you are coming from, to sympathize with your complaints, and to find the constructive criticism lurking far, far beneath the surface of your vitriolic ranting. I’m starting to think that I may have wasted my time.

Slashdot has yet another article about the Apache License 2.0 and whether it is GPL compatible. Alarmingly, however, the article that this one links to is actually … *gasp* … informative! And authoritative! Can this really be the Slashdot we all know and … um … well, know, anyways.

In all seriousness, the article in question is clear and understandable. I find software licensing to be confusing enough without people muddying the waters. This kind of clear exposition of the issues is enormously helpful. And having a place that I can direct people to is also enormously helpful. Many thanks to the folks that put this up there.

For a brief and shining moment yesterday, probably in response to the slashdot article, Apache Cookbook rose to the rank of 210 overall, for all booksales, on Amazon.com. Fortunately, I got a screen capture, since it didn’t stay there long.

So, now, I keep waiting for the folks to show up with armloads of cash.

Yay. Slashdot is running a review of Apache Cookbook, reviewed by Tony Williams. And it comes across almost entirely positive.

🙂

Planet Apache has just come online. There you can see the aggregated thoughts of many of the odd people that make up the Apache Software Foundation.

Yay. The new BookPool mailer features Apache Cookbook in the middle on the front.