Tuesday, 08 March 2011 23:07
Six years ago, I started to invest my time in the Joomla project and besides learning how to develop proper code, I tried to contribute code from day one. Five years ago, I proposed a Google Summer of Code project for Joomla and researched and developed an ACL solution for it. At that time I was a member of the core development team doing my best to improve the code, fix bugs etc. Two years ago, I was asked to be a member of the Joomla Release Team, responsible for steering the development of Joomla 1.6. In the following months, my team and I had many arguments with the Joomla core team/leadership team and whilst we started with three people, I was more or less a lone rider by the end of November 2009.
I pushed hard and tried to bring Joomla 1.6 to something that I would have called 'beta' status and when that time actually came near, people that had not invested a lot of time into the specific development up till then, suddenly took over and started dictating changes. Whilst we, as the release team, were always cautious with our changes and trying to reduce the overall implications of our code, suddenly it was decided to remove promised features and instead to add new, unplanned ones.
So at the end of April 2010 I more or less resigned from my post over the arguments related to this lack of proper management and took a step back into the second row. In June however, I told myself "Hey, your personal arguments with other people inside the project about the over-all managment should not stop you from supporting the project; an argument that stalls the project in the end does not hurt the people in the project, but all of us." So I started again and tried my best to silently support the project with patches and bug fixes. I was already downgraded to a normal JBS member.
My problem, however, is that I'm a political person. I've been active in my student union for a long time and in different political parties and organisations before that. So when the management issues and things that looked like outright *self-censored* to me kept on piling up, I couldn't keep my mouth shut and I tried to convince the people that were still in charge to change their ways. Instead of showing me that they at least received my arguments and constructive criticism, they ignored me and, as in a lot of those cases, I just started to scream louder. At the same time, I didn't stop sending in patches and bugfixes.
In august 2010 this culminated in me being warned to behave or be removed from everything related to the project, as were two other people who shared my point of view. So we took that as a clue and voluntarily removed ourselves from the public mailing lists and stopped contributing to those discussions. For a few more days I still provided patches and bugfixes and in fact at that time, for several months in a row, I was one of the three top contributors solving bugs in Joomla 1.6. To cool down and give all this a chance to maybe heal, I then forced myself to take some time off. So I basically took a holiday from Joomla, flying to Turkey and having a lovely two weeks' vacation there with my girlfriend. No telephone, no internet, not even TV. I just relaxed in the sun.
So I hadn't interacted with the Joomla project in almost three weeks and when I came home, I expected a lot of mails, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. Apparently however my arguments still gnawed at those who I had pointed them towards and two days before I came back from my vacation (remember, I practically didn't interact with anything Joomla for over two weeks at that point) my mailbox received a mail stating that I would be banned for the rest of the year. I would then be allowed to humbly ask for forgiveness, do the kowtow and promise to never doubt the higher beings of Joomla again and then I might be allowed to come back into the arms of the project.
I didn't compromise my views and did not crawl back to them. In the last six months I still provided numerous patches thanks to friends who sent them in under their names and I still worked on improvements for the future of Joomla. If you didn't see it, I worked on a new smaller editor, a greatly improved routing system and some things that I still have in development. All of this is under the GPL and is free for the Joomla project to use. (as is all of the other code that has been developed in Molajo by the others like me that have joined Amy Stephen).
In this last year I have become very angry at most of the people in the Joomla Leadership Team. I have had to correct a lot of my positive impressions about many of the people involved in leadership and I'm utterly disappointed about some people in particular. So, yes, I'm very bitter about these people and I don't think that there is a future for the Joomla project with them in charge. At the same time however I'm very enthusiastic about the people that are just outside of that leadership circle in Joomla. The work in the team of the Molajo distribution of Joomla has shown me that there are a lot of people like me and that there are many good and invested developers out there who try to improve Joomla for the greater good and not just? for their own ego. So I know there will be a future for the community around Joomla. We will see if that is under the brand "Joomla" (which would mean that the leadership team would seriously have to change) or if others take this over and we see the community shift to Nooku or something else. There is more than enough potential out there to counter the lack of management in the current Joomla project and the will of the people is there.
So back to my initial question: I might be bitter about the leadership of the Joomla project, but I'm everything else about the project itself. This community lives and it will be thriving.
Oh, and if you wonder what happened to my ban: I found some serious bugs beginning january and had the audacity to report them before 1.6.0 was released, my ban was made permanent - by, amongst other things, deleting my account on joomlacode.org.