While the Sonatype team has been focused on making Sonatype Nexus Repository an excellent repository manager, we have also been working in many areas and on many projects to improve the Maven ecosystem.
In this post, I'm going to try to describe the ways in which we've tried to help set a solid foundation for continued development. For the past decade, we have tried as much as possible to create social capital and increase technical cohesion among the various projects and interests that define the Maven community. Before I can get into the specific ways that Sonatype contributes to the open source ecosystem surrounding Maven and Sonatype Nexus Repository, I will need to define those two terms: social capital and technical cohesion, and I will need to discuss Maven's origins.
While Maven was created to meet the needs of a specific project, then part of the Jakarta project at the ASF, it was also a concept that I had been thinking about for a few years. I rarely enjoy foisting my own philosophical views on others, and I'm not going to start doing that in this post. What I will do is talk about the ideas about architecture, technology, and progress that helped shape my own view of what problems Maven was designed to solve, and how the organization and approach of the Maven community has been shaped by these ideas.
Social Capital
I came to understand the term social capital in 1995 by way of Francis Fukuyama's excellent book Trust. The flavor of social capital, which I have come to like most, is that described by Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities: social capital consists of networks of trust and norms of reciprocity that have emerged over time, which promote voluntary exchange. Trust, reciprocity, and voluntary exchange are all essential for the development of large-scale projects, such as cities, which are comprised of communities "characterized by layered complexity and seeming chaos." Any attempt to oversee economic development should consider the importance of informal contact, which Jacobs describes as the "small change" that forms the basis of the fine structure.
Social capital is primarily used as an economic term to describe the value of networks, but I think it's quite apropos as a term used for groups of people developing software. While Jacob's writing directly related to urban planning, her criticism of "modernist" urban planning and her embrace of dense, mixed-use urban neighborhoods provides an almost perfect analogy to the way open source works. Good development projects resemble the vibrant urban neighborhoods Jane Jacobs advocated for, such as New York's Village, which provide appropriate infrastructure to allow individuals to interact naturally and act as efficient markets for social capital.
Social capital is the currency that allows individuals to collaborate in an open source environment. Projects like Maven at the ASF are the neighborhoods in which we interact.
As Fukuyama writes in Trust:
"[A healthy] economy is one in which there will be sufficient social capital in the underlying society to permit businesses, corporations, networks, and the like to be self-organizing…The same propensity for spontaneous sociability that is key to building durable businesses is also indispensable for putting together effective political organizations”
Technical Cohesion
When I use the term technical cohesion, it is a combination of ideas from two influential thinkers: the historian and philosopher Lewis Mumford and the architect Christopher Alexander.
Lewis Mumford wrote The Myth of the Machine in which he posits that technology, which he calls Megatechnics, "work against technical perfection, durability, social efficiency, and human satisfaction." That constant need to expand, produce a ceaseless stream of goods, and replace them endlessly does nothing to improve the human situation. Now, if you resonate with Mumford's view of technical progress, it can often be difficult to operate in an industry dominated by a new fad every week. The software industry has been intoxicated with a special brand of "Megatechnics" for some time. If a project hasn't added several new features in the last month or added support for several new scripting languages, it is considered a failure. This constant push for change for the sake of change works against durable technical design, but also affects technical cohesion.
Christopher Alexander is the author of Notes on the Synthesis of Form and the more well known A Pattern Language. In a nutshell, he believed there are healthy, common patterns at the level of infrastructure that yield "wealth" in towns and cities, where to him "wealth" had a broader definition than a simple monetary meaning. Maven and the tools it supports were designed to provide just this infrastructure for software development. Alexander's work in Notes on the Synthesis of Form relates the ideas of sustainability expressed in Mumford's Megatechnics and echos the ideas of urban planning put forward by Jane Jacobs. Throughout Alexander's work, design is a continuously incremental and organic process.
In the Maven community, I have always tried to resist change for change's sake. This is a deliberate strategy, and I'm confident that this has helped us avoid the alienation and social inefficiency Mumford ascribes to Megatechnics. For example, even if creating a POM in YAML is a good idea for a few developers, incorporating it into the core Maven code without a long-term vision is a mistake. With Maven 3, we've finally developed the underlying infrastructure to make pluggable POM interpreters a reality. This could only have happened after many years of working out long-term, strategic processes. Hacking on a new feature to keep up with the industry hype machine is not the way to create durable, lasting goods that will stand the test of time. Mumford's ideas are somewhat contrarian in a culture defined by "disposable everything", but, in the case of the Maven community, I believe they have helped encourage more technical cohesion between the various tools and components produced by the community.
Our Contribution: A Foundation of Infrastructure
Once you roll all these various influences together and add eight years of Maven to the mix, you have an effort to create a set of tools and patterns for constructing, testing, distributing, and provisioning software that reaches effective system equilibrium. By that, I mean that much of Maven has reached the durable ideal that Mumford speaks of in Megatechnics: large parts of "the system" will likely never be replaced, and the system will be widely understood to a point where it passes into the background and people get on with the work that is important. Think of Maven as infrastructure for a great city like Portland. You rarely have to think about details like neighborhood organization or basic infrastructure like water or power, because they "just work."
These ideas heavily influence the work Sonatype does on Maven, Tycho, Nexus, M2Eclipse, and Hudson. We want the Maven community to be stakeholders, and for anyone in the community to build upon the stable foundation we are trying to arrive at. Much of Maven has reached this equilibrium, and as we continue to progress into the new decade, we're continuing to strive for a durable, sustainable technology that will lay the foundation for future progress.
One of the ideas that permeates Christopher Alexander's more recent approaches to building living neighborhoods is that inhabitants, people who will live in a particular neighborhood, must themselves be active participants in the planning and construction of these neighborhoods. Sonatype takes this idea seriously when we participate in open source community. Maven isn't just something that is a means to an end for Sonatype, it's not just the framework that supports our commercial product offerings, it's much like our neighborhoods. We have been involved in this community for eight years, and we've been watching the culture and population evolve over time.
We are not just contractors or vendors creating derivative technologies built atop the work of others. We are central actors collaborating with other dedicated members of the Maven ecosystem, doing messy, often challenging work to develop social capital and technical cohesion in an open community. We are developing standards and conventions used by a diverse, mixed-used community of millions of developers, and we are doing the heavy lifting to ensure that Maven evolves to become an even more solid foundation for global development. Our development and documentation benefits our customers, our community, and sometimes our competition. This is the sort of voluntary exchange Jane Jacobs discussed in her work.
Helping to Build a Living Neighborhood
Sonatype has been engaged in a multi-year effort to create free, foundational documentation to support the millions of developers who use the software we contribute to. We are "daring greatly" to invest in emerging technologies like polyglot Maven that will form the foundation of innovations yet to be imagined. The next year promises to be as revolutionary for Maven and the growing constellation of related projects as the last few years combined.
There are critics of Maven, Nexus, and the technologies we help create. As there should be. Healthy, informed criticism helps push the community toward innovation, but I think many people who approach Maven and encounter its rough edges should know that, like any community, there are participants and observers. It is very easy to look at a living project such as Maven, the product of years of wide collaboration, and find problems. In any great city, there are still issues to be resolved and progress to be made. While we strive for technical durability, Maven will never be a completely "finished" product. This year, I noticed a reduction in "cheap critics," those who might fire up Twitter or some blogging client to send an errant round into the ether. More and more people are realizing that we are here, we are listening, we are ready and waiting to help those who might have questions or issues.
I recently heard a Teddy Roosevelt quote that put Sonatype's relationship with the community in context.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
The decade to come for Maven will be as interesting as the last eight years.
Jason is a co-founder and the former CTO of Sonatype.
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