Build, Test, Deliver
For a long time we have needed a clear way to explain what we have been doing, how we do it and what our goals and road map are. When I was in Brazil a few months back David Wheeler discussed our progress, development model and goals with Bruno, Dalibor and me. As an outsider to our development community he was able to give us a clear picture of what we were actually doing. He has a nice writeup of the whole event. We discussed how to put down how we Build, Test and Deliver everything. And I asked several people and groups for input. But it is hard to get consensus on what are the essential things. Especially because we really wanted to put it all down in just 2 pages so it could be used as a quick reference for new people. Or used as a flyer at conferences.
Recently I spoke to various people who were happily surprised that various things we helped with (in particular Eclipse 3, Tomcat 5, ant, etc.) just worked with their latest Ubuntu and Fedora Core installations just using Free Software. Their surprise made me realize that we have to do a better job of communicating what we have done and how we are delivering it. So I just updated the document that we started during FISL to our current status and road map. I didn’t get it down to 2 pages, but 3 pages isn’t bad for a start. I cannot thank David enough for his patience and SouJava for bringing us together. But all mistakes in the final document are mine. This is clearly a first release, so please send corrections, additions, better pictures, translations, etc.
There is now a PDF, OpenDocument and OpenOffice (sxw) version of the paper: Escaping the Java Trap: A practical road map to the Free Software and Open Source alternatives. I also tried to export it as XHTML, but the result was not very readable. Help converting the document to other formats is highly appreciated. (Update: Thanks to Baron Schwartz there is now also a nice clean HTML version.)
I hope this document can be a base for more specialized support and marketing documents for our efforts. So please feel free to adapt it to your own needs and audience.