Another Revusky Incident
Hm.
Just been called Liar in public by Mr. Revusky (he referred to me as a clown before).
And why that? Because I don’t care about his personal pet-peeve: FreeMarker, but prefer to work in a community that is not as hostile (or “competitive”).
It’s not even that I don’t like FreeMarker. I do consider it a nice and very versatile tool. However if I wanted to use it for anything beyond toying around, I’d have to get in touch with the community, something that even community leaders told me not to do because “community and culture is completely incompatible with individuals such as yourself”. Where does this hate come from?
In my opinion, there seems to be some sort of deep-seated inferiority complex over the popularity of Velocity, a project perceived as competitor. Well, guess what? This is not corporate business. Competition is not only good; it is healthy in the open-source community and it helps keeping projects afoot.
So why is there a (perceived?) popularity issue of Velocity over FreeMarker? Is it because the Velocity people go around and advertise how great their product is? I strongly doubt that. Is it because they belittle other projects? Surely not. So why is a small, quite inactive project like Velocity so much more popular than FreeMarker, WebMacro and all the other templating engines? Or is it not and it is just a perception issue?
Gee, it seems that some decisions are neither feature nor competition driven…
It is not that Mr. Revusky doesn’t have a point. But in my opinion, you shouldn’t piss at the people that you want to persuade to use your tool. Just bible-thumping that your tool is much superior to anything and everyone should fall over their feet just to get it, never brought anyone anywhere. Getting other projects to embrace your stuff is the way to go.
Something in which the ASF is extremely good at. And not just because it has a high profile. But because it attracts people who share these ideas. And that is not just mythology.
apache freemarker velocity
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