Wednesday, November 01, 2006 10:15 PM
With the Castle Project getting ready to go 1.0 I wanted to ask Hammett (the man who started it all) some questions. Well, here are his answers.
Me: When did you start developing the Castle project? Why?
Hammett: At some point between 2003 and 2004, as a container for .Net under the
apache avalon project. And as any other open source project, it was
meant to scratch an itchy I had.
Me: The Castle project is getting quite large (DynamicProxy, MicroKernel, Windsor, MonoRail, ActiveRecord, and AspectSharp) how do you manage it all?
Hammett: Well, I don't. I cannot focus on all of them, but I can watch whats is
going on and try to influence the developers. ActiveRecord and
MicroKernel/Windsor were greatly improved by the committers in the
past months.
Me: Now that the big 1.0 of Castle is coming together what have you learned about managing an Open Source project.
Hammett: Depends on how you manage it. Projects can use meritocracy or
benevolent dictatorship, the latter might be easier. At Castle Project
we use meritocracy and people decide important things voting. In
general, as the project grows it gets really hard to manage, bugs and
not well implemented things can go to the repository and stay there
fow a long time until an user complains about it. But that's a
consequence of growing large, and it's not all bad.
Me: What would you say to someone about starting an open source project.
Hammett: Say goodbye to your spare time, and let your girlfriend/wife and your
family know up-front. Also don't give up, it might take a few months
to get attention, but if you build it, they'll come.
Me: What is in the future for Castle, now that 1.0 is almost out the door?
Hammett: There are ideas aplenty, just need to be implemented. The project is
maturing fast and is being embraced by lots of companies from
different sizes. We fixed some weak points like documentation and
apotion and learning should be made easier with the RC 2
Well thats it for now. Here is to Castle and its lovely ASP.Net alternative MonoRail. If this was of any interest to you let me know and I will ask other project members your questions. -d