Sonatype - a new company around Maven
From Jason van Zyl's Maven Diaries:
Since my departure from Mergere I've been quietly and steadily working to help start a Maven related company that I'm proud to say I'm a part of. No grandiose launch, no marketing hype, no VCs, haven't talked to a single analyst, and we hope that you can actually understand what we do by looking at our website. The company's name is Sonatype and I'm finally happy with the people involved and the direction we're headed in. We are focused on facilitating the adoption of Maven through our partners network, providing training, and delivering Maven related products for software development.
Having two companies wrapped around Maven can't be a bad thing. However, let's hope Sonatype has some funding to pay folks to work on the project more, rather than other products that may or may not be successful.
Two things that could make this company very well liked in the open source community:
- Clean up the Maven Repository: Add/delete/modify as requested by users. There's other projects using the repo now and even folks campaigning against Maven. If Maven folks are responsible for cleaning it up, they'll be heroes.
- Provide repository statistics: A lot of open source projects like to track their download statistics. It's a metric for measuring success (in addition to mailing list traffic). If they move to a full Maven-based distribution model (like AppFuse is), there's no more statistics.
Are there other things you think Sonatype can do to make Maven easier to use and more successful?
Congrats to Neel, Jason, John, Kenney, Andrew, Eric and Eirik. I hope you succeed in your mission. I think w/o the VCs and the get-rich-quick folks, it should be a lot easier. Cash isn't always the key indicator of success - more often happiness and job satisfaction are.