Dear Oleg,
I would like to take this opportunity to publicly reiterate the
sincere appreciation I expressed to you in DM yesterday for your
helpful (because you helped me discover a JEP that was previously
unknown to me) and timely (because you replied to my DMs right away)
assistance. While you may have interpreted my questions about the
process and my resulting gesture of appreciation in a negative light,
I would like to assure you and everyone else reading this thread that
they were both genuine. My previous message to this list has adhered
to the process established in JEP-15, chapter and verse, out of my
sincere and utmost respect for the process itself and for your
stewardship of it. I stand by what I wrote to you in DM yesterday and
what I wrote in my previous message to this list, both of which were
in good faith. It is important to remember that not everyone has been
involved in the project for as long as you have been, and many
newcomers like myself are either unaware of these older JEPs or
unfamiliar with the context behind them. A lot of project
documentation (e.g., the documentation for CLAs) is incomplete or
out-of-date, so it can sometimes be difficult to determine which
documentation is still relevant and which documentation is no longer
relevant. As people like me learn to navigate these established
processes, your patience is appreciated. Thanks for understanding.
One additional point of clarification I would like to make is that I
confirmed with Strumenta that the Linux Foundation meets Strumenta's
criteria for being a registered business, so VAT does not apply.
Regarding the price of the engagement, I think that comes with the
territory of working with legacy technology: there are relatively few
people with ANTLR2 knowledge/experience who are also willing to work
on legacy ANTLR2 code, so they can command a higher market rate. (I
suspect something similar might be the case for COBOL programmers!) I
can also disclose that I came up with this idea on my own without any
prompting (either explicit or implicit) from my employer. Like you, I
think it is in the long-term interest of the project for us to move
forward with this upgrade and eliminate the liability of one of our
most ancient dependencies. Proceeding with this engagement will pay
down technical debt and eliminate an impediment to future Java
Platform improvements. If there are any additional questions or
concerns, please let me know!
Thanks,
Basil