Re: Exist DB Community Changes

Hi Eduard,

Sorry to hear that this is causing you stress. I can also sympathise with
the technical issues you have raised. I already addressed some of those in
the past in FusionDB.
If you might be interested in Elemental, or you think I might be able to
help you, please don't hesitate to get in touch with me -
[email protected]

Kindest regards, and best wishes, Adam.

On Fri, 6 Dec 2024 at 09:54, Eduard Drenth <[email protected]>
wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> For our institution this all strengthens the feeling we need to reconsider
> the use of exist-db, we already felt that need because of performance, old
> java versions and libs, long standing issues, one highly complex monolithic
> solution for both database and app development, no jakarta ee compatible
> war, no atomic transactions, poor support for multiuser editing, etc.
>
> I value Xml and exist-db a lot, don't get me wrong, but our institution
> needs to make future proof choices, and I wonder whether sticking with
> exist-db is a good choice in that respect.
>
> Regards,
> Eduard
>
>
>
> Eduard Drenth, Software Architekt
>
>
> [email protected]
>
>
> Doelestrjitte 8
>
> 8911 DX  Ljouwert
> (058) 213 14 14
>
> +31 62 094 34 28
> https://www.fryske-akademy.nl/
> https://frysker.nl/
> https://frisian.eu/
>
> gpg:
> https://keyserver.ubuntu.com/pks/lookup?search=eduard+drenth&fingerprint=on&op=index
> ------------------------------
> *From:* Adam Retter <[email protected]>
> *Sent:* Monday, November 4, 2024 11:57 PM
> *To:* Craig Berry <[email protected]>
> *Cc:* [email protected] <[email protected]>
> *Subject:* Re: [Exist-open] Exist DB Community Changes
>
> Thanks for the email Craig. Whilst I am deeply surprised and upset about
> what has happened, I am also sorry that it is effecting the eXist-db users
> such as yourself that I have worked so hard for and care about.
>
> I appreciate you crunching and highlighting the numbers. For those who
> appreciate stats, a couple more for you:
>
> 1. As you say commits aren't everything. I also produced the last 22
> consecutive releases of eXist-db.
> Since 2017, of the 52 releases, I produced 75% of them. I did this unpaid.
> My company Evolved Binary also at its own expense maintains a lot of the
> technical infrastructure that is required to produce and publish releases
> of eXist-db.
> See - https://github.com/eXist-db/exist/releases
>
> 2. From your list of contributors. 8 of the other named people
> contributing to eXist-db were directed by me and paid for solely by my
> company Evolved Binary. There is also 1 more who was partially funded by my
> company. Removing me from the eXist-db project will also remove those other
> contributors too.
>
> 3. I undertook a 1 year solo project from 2017 to 2018 to fix locking and
> data corruption issues. It's not perfect still, but it was much improved.
> That code base is was what became eXist-db 5.
>
> https://evolvedbinary.com/technical-reports/exist-db/locking-and-cache-improvements/locking-and-cache-improvements-20180205.pdf
>
> https://evolvedbinary.com/technical-reports/exist-db/asymmetrical-locking/asymmetrical-locking-20180205.pdf
>
> 4. I migrated eXist-db through 3 major versions of Java. To Java 6, then
> Java 8, and then again later to Java 17. I did this unpaid.
>
> 5. I migrated eXist-db's code base from SourceForge (and Subversion) to
> GitHub (and Git), which is why we have a comprehensive and intact source
> history and can still see who has done what and when. I did this unpaid.
> Speaking of which, you can also download CSV files from the graphs of
> contributors on GitHub going back to 2003 here -
> https://github.com/eXist-db/exist/graphs/contributors. GitHub's own
> graphs are quite revealing!
> Out of sheer personal curiosity, I crunched some data myself. Considering
> only the top four contributors (as I didn't have time to crunch all the
> data available), I produced a little graph from the CSV data (attached).
> One could perhaps make the argument hat I have been the core contributor
> and maintainer of eXist-db since about 2015.
>
> Regards the future of eXist-db, I have some plans. Feel free to reach out
> to me - [email protected].
>
>
> [image: Screenshot 2024-11-04 at 23.48.08.png]
>
> On Mon, 4 Nov 2024 at 09:59, Craig Berry via Exist-open <
> [email protected]> wrote:
>
> As someone who has had cordial and helpful interactions with both Adam and
> with some of the eXist Solutions folks for several years, this state of
> affairs really saddens me.  As someone who maintains a project that depends
> on eXist, it also really concerns me about the future of eXist.
>
> I've had the somewhat vague impression that Adam has done the lion's share
> of the work to maintain eXist for quite some time, and I wanted to make
> that impression less vague, so I did some digging.  The git logs below show
> that in the current develop branch the number of non-merge commits in the
> last five years totals 3115, or 2261 after weeding out dependabot commits.
> That's followed by a list showing the number of non-merge commits per
> committer in descending order by commit count.
>
> With 1266 commits, Adam produced 56% of all the human-produced commits in
> that period, 4.5 times as many as the next most-prolific human contributor.
> I realize commit counts are somewhat of a rough-and-ready placeholder for
> contribution and they surely overstate some things and understate others.
> One of the things they understate is producing releases, and it seems like
> Adam has done most of those in recent years too.
>
> I want to emphasize that I really appreciate the work of *all* the
> contributors, and I'm merely pointing out that the already somewhat anemic
> pace of eXist development appears to have taken a very serious blow given
> that its one really prolific contributor is being locked out. Is there a
> plan to address this?  Should folks be looking for an alternative to eXist?
>
> % git describe
> eXist-6.2.0-1595-ge8b4798931
> % git log --no-merges --pretty=format:"%an" --since=2019-11-01 | wc -l
>     3115
> % git log --no-merges --pretty=format:"%an" --since=2019-11-01 \
> | perl -ne 'chomp; $au{$_}++; END {for my $x (sort { $au{$b} <=> $au{$a} }
> keys %au ) {print qq/$au{$x}\t$x\n/}};'
> 1266    Adam Retter
> 638     dependabot[bot]
> 277     Dannes Wessels
> 253     Juri Leino
> 216     dependabot-preview[bot]
> 152     Alan Paxton
> 69      Patrick Reinhart
> 54      Christopher McGeorge
> 27      Joe Wicentowski
> 26      mamroure
> 19      marmoure
> 17      Radek Hubner
> 17      duncdrum
> 17      Gabriele Tomassetti
> 16      Wolfgang Meier
> 12      Adrian Hamm
> 10      Duncan Paterson
> 9       Lars Windauer
> 6       Stanislav Jordanov
> 5       Nico Verwer
> 1       Stefan Hynek
> 1       markhall82
> 1       lujie
> 1       Otmar Humbel
> 1       stephan makowski
> 1       naveen
> 1       hoijui
> 1       [email protected]
> 1       Alberto Simões
> 1       Steven
>
>
> > On Nov 2, 2024, at 6:11 AM, Adam Retter <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> >
> > For those that are interested in hearing the truth, please feel free to
> contact me directly. Or if you wish you can read the public responses from
> myself, and other eXist-db users and XML experts in the #community channel
> of the eXist-db Slack Workspace - https://exist-db.slack.com/
> >
> >
> >
> > On Wed, 30 Oct 2024 at 16:31, Duncan Paterson <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> > In an abstract for his presentation at the upcoming Declarative
> Amsterdam conference, Adam Retter announced his decision to fork eXist-db
> and launch a competing project. This action is commonplace in open source.
> However, in justifying his decision, Adam maligned the eXist community and
> project - in a strikingly unprofessional manner.
> >
> > On October 7 and 14, 2024 during the weekly Community Call, eXist-db’s
> core developers and active community members discussed this matter and
> unanimously concluded that we no longer have the necessary trust in Adam to
> speak or act in the best interests of the eXist community. We have
> therefore revoked his status as a core developer and his administrative
> privileges from the eXist-db GitHub organization and related community
> resources. We regret having to take these measures. But we believe that
> they are vital to restoring the collegial and welcoming atmosphere that
> marked the eXist-db community since its founding by Wolfgang Meier in 2001.
> We thank Adam for all of his work on eXist-db and wish him well with his
> new project.
> >
> >
> > == Signatories ==
> >
> > Dannes Wessels,
> > Duncan Paterson,
> > Joseph Wicentowski,
> > Joern Turner,
> > Juri Leino,
> > Lars Windauer,
> > Magdalena Turska,
> > Olaf Schreck,
> > Patrick Reinhart,
> > Wolfgang Meier, (founder eXist-db)
> > _______________________________________________
> > Exist-open mailing list
> > [email protected]
> > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/exist-open
> >
> >
> > --
> > Adam Retter
> >
> > eXist Core Developer
> > { United Kingdom }
> > [email protected]
> > _______________________________________________
> > Exist-open mailing list
> > [email protected]
> > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/exist-open
>
> ________________________________________
> Craig A. Berry
>
> "... getting out of a sonnet is much more
>  difficult than getting in."
>                  Brad Leithauser
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Exist-open mailing list
> [email protected]
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/exist-open
>
>
>
> --
> Adam Retter
>
> eXist Core Developer
> { United Kingdom }
> [email protected]
> _______________________________________________
> Exist-open mailing list
> [email protected]
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/exist-open
>


-- 
Adam Retter

eXist Core Developer
{ United Kingdom }
[email protected]

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