How do you spell Community?

Some projects use the word community to be synonmyous with “stakeholders“. For example, Spring addresses its product announcements to “The Spring Community”. Evidentally, the committers are not the community, since they would not need to address these announcements to themselves! From this perspective, the “community” is somebody else.

Other projects use the word community differently. At the ASF, we sometimes talk of a project “losing its community”. When we say that, we do not mean the software isn’t being used. We do not mean that the software has no stakeholders. We mean that there is no one that is actively contributing to the software. No one is applying patches. No one is answering posts to the mailing lists.

In fact, the Apache HTTPD product was born because the NCSA server “lost its community”. The server’s primary developer, Rob McCool, left the NCSA in mid-1994, and the project stalled. People were still using the server, and users were circulating patches to correct this bug or add that feature. But, no one was creating a distribution that incorporated all the latest patches. In response, a small group of volunteers banded together to create the Apache HTTPD community, and the rest is history.

People being people, we are not always consistent. Sometimes when ASF folk say community, we mean the set of stakeholders. Sometimes, when we say community, we mean the core group of contributors that apply the patches and answer posts to the mailing list.

But regardless of how we use or misuse the word community, in the end, ASF committers still eat our own dog food. In the end, we are all trying to build the product that we want to use ourselves, in our own day jobs. Then we share the wealth, just in case other people might want to use the product too.