What's it all about, Alfie?

Well… today has been an interesting day for one open source project that I've been working with for about the last year or so - ZeroMQ. Today I learned that two of the key developers in the group have "jumped ship" and forked the codebase, and are calling themselves Crossroads I/O. Their project, libxs, is really just a fork of the ZeroMQ code, and they are off to the races with a new Open Source company/project, and without the backing and support of a lot of the ZeroMQ community.

Today in IRC, it was a real surprise to hear Pieter talking about all the grief that was hidden from me, at least, in 2011. Trying to keep the group together was his job - and in the end, he realized that it just wasn't possible. So away Mato and Martin went, and the group is now light those two major developers.

I look at this with a lot of curiosity. When they had 2.1.x, it was good, decent, and while not perfect, it could have used a lot of improvement. Rather than do that, they started a 3.0 branch, with a completely different API, and all of a sudden, the upgrade path to me wasn't clear. I didn't mind it so much as we were moving away from it as the delivery transport in the project, but it still bothered me that they wanted to have a new API and a re-write of large sections of the code so soon after they just got 2.x out the door.

Dynamic and flamboyant individuals are nice to really move a project, but I can see that they can also be the worst liability to a project like ZeroMQ, as well. If they want to take the project in directions that the majority of users don't want, then they are going to make the project appear to be run by lunatics. But without them, you may face the problem that fixing the bugs they made are near to impossible in any reasonable timeframe.

So on the whole, I hope things work out for ZeroMQ, I really do. I think it's got a good idea that needs a little work to make it a really robust and reliable messaging system. But it's going to need to attract a few key, strong, developers to make it work.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 15th, 2012 at 2:19 pm and is filed under Coding, Open Source Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.