[Windmill-dev] Re: [strategy] Windmill and OSAF

[Katie Capps Parlante]

Hi Mikeal,

Yes, you have OSAF's blessing to move the project and more formally take
control over it (including taking the name). I think you are correct
that logistically it will be easier for everyone involved for you to
take over Windmill outside of OSAF.

One request -- it would be cool if you wrote an entry in the OSAF blog
giving a Windmill update, perhaps when you do the move.

We'd love to see Windmill thrive -- I'm glad to see that you and
Adam continue to be committed to the project.

Cheers,
Katie

Mikeal Rogers wrote:
> This is a hard post to make but I can't keep ignoring the feedback I'm 
> getting from people in the community.
> 
> For a while now, I've been getting concerned input about windmill's 
> future, in particular concerns about OSAF's uncertain future effecting 
> the windmill project.
> 
> After objectively looking at the current state of affairs I've decided 
> to make a proposal. Before I do, I'd like to reflect on the history of 
> windmill and OSAF's role in it. The most concerning thing for me has 
> been that these concerns/feedback seem to paint OSAF's relationship with 
> windmill entirely negatively and for those of us that created the 
> project this invokes a strong emotional reaction because we know how 
> important OSAF has been to windmill and before we move on I'd like 
> everyone in the community to understand that role.
> 
> = History Lesson =
> 
> One day I was asked to find a way to get functional UI tests working 
> against the Cosmo Web Interface (at that time still called Scooby). I 
> looked at Selenium and decided it didn't yet cut the mustard, and with 
> no other alternative we decided to table automated web UI testing. 3 
> months later Adam Christian began work at OSAF on a contract and 
> Selenium had just made some major improvements and was advertising some 
> of the features it lacked earlier and were the reason I turned it down.
> 
> Adam spent about a month writing tests in Selenium, he ended up writing 
> a lot of patches to SeleniumCore to get these working, all of those 
> patches fell on deaf ears and we resigned to maintaining a local branch 
> of the SeleniumCore code. Then I was asked to move all those tests to 
> run on SeleniumRC and get it working in continuous integration. At the 
> same time we were also finishing up the next version of the WebUI and 
> Adam was tasked with getting all the previous tests running against the 
> new version.
> 
> Both tasks ended up being incredibly more difficult than they should 
> have been, and we realized that this strategy couldn't scale, especially 
> with the time based releases we all wanted to see Cosmo move to. At this 
> point we had some ideas about how to make things better, and we started 
> asking some of the OSAF higher ups, in particular Ted Leung, if it would 
> be ok for us to write a replacement for Selenium.
> 
> It needs to be said here that anyone else, at any other employer 
> probably would have told us to have our heads examined. Adam was just 
> out of college and I had never written a Python project as large as the 
> one we were talking about doing. But we were certain we could do it and 
> Ted and OSAF supported us. We spent 2 months writing the initial version 
> of windmill and initial test suite for Cosmo. That was two months of 
> employment for two people that could have been a wash if we were wrong 
> or we couldn't hack it. OSAF is a small place ( at the time consisting 
> of less that 30 people), it doesn't go unnoticed when two of them are 
> banging away for 2 months on a repository nobody is watching while 
> everyone else is writing product code. It's easy to say that windmill 
> wouldn't exist if it weren't for OSAF or Ted, but more importantly it 
> wouldn't exist is OSAF and Ted weren't who they were, if it were anyone 
> else, anywhere else, it never would have been done.
> 
> We kept incrementally improving windmill, first so that other people at 
> OSAF could run it and write tests and then, in preparation for our talk 
> at OSCON, so that people in the community could use it. Our OSCON talk 
> was very well received and we've enjoyed a steady growth in use and 
> participation ever since. In this time the only stable contributor we 
> gained was another OSAF employee, Matt Eernissee, who always 
> participated in the project but at some point decided to write the 
> JavaScript test framework in windmill. At the time his manager was Ted 
> and again Ted decided to let Matt spend time improving windmill and not 
> writing new Cosmo features with the hope that eventually we could 
> automate even more testing inside of the product.
> 
> The success of windmill inside of OSAF is something most people don't 
> know about. In mid-2007 Cosmo moved to two week time based releases, and 
> the QA team decided to drop all manual testing. The signoff process 
> would be completely automated, and all of the QA cycle would be spent 
> writing automated tests and tracking failures in existing tests. I have 
> NEVER worked ANYWHERE that was even close to achieving this level of 
> test automation, and there is no question that we couldn't have done it 
> without windmill.
> 
> It was widely publicized in January of 2008 that Mitch Kapor had decided 
> to leave OSAF, and that he would not be renewing funding after it's 
> current year. This lead to a condensing of the full time staff, most 
> notably all of QA would be asked to leave. This was a decision I 
> absolutely agreed with. Windmill was at the point that the developers 
> could continue writing automated tests themselves. We did an amazing 
> thing, we automated ourselves out of the job, and in the end we felt 
> good about the condition we were leaving things in and we had no doubts 
> that we would land on our feet and that we would be able to continue to 
> maintain windmill at whatever full time employer we ended up. At that 
> time the people actively contributing to windmill were; Myself (QA 
> Developer), Adam Christian (QA Developer), Matt Eernissee (JavaScript 
> Cosmo Developer), Bear (Continuous Integration and Infrastructure), and 
> Ted Leung ( All around project leadership and support). All of us left 
> OSAF, some were asked to leave, some asked to leave on their own.
> 
> Katie Capps Parlante (Head of OSAF) said there would be no problem 
> leaving the windmill project at OSAF and we never had any reason to move 
> it... until now.
> 
> = Now =
> 
> OSAF is focusing on it's core mission and products. It has a tight group 
> of developers banging away on Chandler (Desktop and Server). Things like 
> budget concerns, hosting concerns, the future of the project after the 
> current budget, all happen on a private mailing list. These things have 
> _always_ been on a private mailing list and since I didn't complain 
> about that when I worked there I certainly can't complain about it now 
> just because I'm not on it. OSAF doesn't keep the windmill project in 
> the loop about this stuff, and if OSAF has a chance to survive another 
> year they _shouldn't_ be keeping us in the loop. OSAF is focusing on 
> what are the very most important tasks they should be doing, and 
> windmill isn't a part of that.
> 
> At this time, the only thing leaving windmill at OSAF is doing is adding 
> to the list of things OSAF has to deal with and causing uncertainty in 
> our community about the future of the project.
> 
> = The Proposal =
> 
> First off;
> 
> 1) WINDMILL WILL NOT BE MOVING TO MOZILLA.
> 2) WINDMILL WILL NOT BE MOVING TO GOOGLE CODE.
> 
> Because I'm employed at Mozilla full time, and now Adam is employed part 
> time, some people assume we're working on windmill for Mozilla and that 
> we may want to move the project there. To clear the record nether I nor 
> Adam do any work whatsoever on windmill at the behest of Mozilla. [ 
> We're working on something else together, it's super cool and awesome 
> and we can show it to you at OSCON this year :)  ] More importantly, 
> windmill just isn't a big enough project to need large institutional 
> backing, windmill certainly has issues and some of those are issues of 
> organization, but I'm not convinced having some kind of institutional 
> backing will actually help that.
> 
> Trac has been good for windmill. We don't use all the features, and we 
> don't use some of them nearly enough, but Google code just isn't suited 
> for a project the size of windmill. And I'm not some Google Code hater, 
> I host 10 different libraries on Google Code and I think it's perfect 
> for each one of them, I just don't think it's right for _this_ project. 
> Plus, nobody is jumping up and down at the idea of migrating all the 
> documentation in trac to a new wiki format :P
> 
> So here is the proposal
> 
> 1) Move the Trac install to my personal server (I have free hosting so 
> bandwidth isn't an issue)
> 2) Move the SVN repository to my personal server
> 3) Setup rsync backups for the project to both my home server and Adam's 
> (and anyone else who wants to contribute some more backup redundancy)
> 4) Move the email list to Google Groups (I'm not setting up Mailman, you 
> can all go to hell)
> 5) Move all the urls to www.getwindmill.com (we also have .net/.org)
> 6) Setup an apache forward for windmill.osafoundation.org to 
> www.getwindmill.com
> 7) Pour a nice glass of scotch and wait for people to find all the crap 
> that we accidentally broke in the migration.
> 
> The last thing to note is that OSAF owns copyright on all the windmill 
> code. Contributions fall under the OSAF contributor agreement. All the 
> code Adam/Me/Matt/and Bear wrote is owned by OSAF as we were employed by 
> them at the time. That ownership doesn't just go away, it will remain. 
> But we, the contributors/maintainers of windmill are making a decision 
> to move the project. That means the contributor agreement will go away 
> and we'll need to write a new (most likely less restrictive) 
> contribution policy (and I will advocate we do _not_ force contributors 
> to sign said agreements). The details of this policy are something we 
> can discuss after the move, but the repercussions of OSAF's ownership 
> are thus;
> 
> Although no trademark has been filed, OSAF owns the name windmill. They 
> also own the current code base. If Katie and the rest of OSAF decide for 
> whatever reason they want to retain control of the project they can 
> force us to fork and rename it if we want to go ahead with the move. I 
> seriously doubt this will happen and I'm confident that everyone at OSAF 
> will recognize that it's mutually beneficial for us to move, but this is 
> still a possibility.
> 
> I now await comments, +1/-1 from contributors, and some kind of formal 
> response from OSAF blessing the move.
> 
> -Mikeal
> 
> 
> 
> 
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