Discursive

Very often someone shows up on the Maven User list with a question along the lines of: How can I get Maven to compile my project using dependencies? Your help is very much appreciated." I usually translate this into: "I'm a student who has just been asked to use Maven and I want you to do my homework." Or worse, "My boss wants me to learn Maven, will you learn it for me and after you are done send me detailed instructions. I am too lazy to read the free book." These emails are obvious, you can see them a mile away... very often they go ignored for days and days.

When I hear that someone has blogged about some general Maven hatred, I cringe and expect to read a post that consists of 30% incorrect assumptions about how Maven should be used, 50% ignorance of the most basic concepts, and 20% truth. What can be done:

• The Maven Users lists needs to become a bit more opinionated for first time users. If someone enters into the discussion asking the following question:
  
  

  "I'm attempting to publish a directory full of JARs to my local repository using the Install plugin."

  
  

Click on this picture of a story from today's New York Post, anyone notice a problem?

A confident picture of Steve Ballmer juxtaposed with the worried face of Larry Page. Except the caption says Sergey Brin. Typical NY Post blunder, maybe they used Bing to search for Larry Page's image?

A few weeks ago, the Common Java Cookbook received a spike of traffic from DZone. In the intervening weeks, people let me know that they really want a PDF version of the book...

PDF Now Available

You can download the PDF, or you can read the book on Scribd...

As promised, I'm opening up the license for the cj-cookbook. I'm starting out with Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives-Non-commercial 3.0 US. So, I think that this license is a bit Draconian. It essentially means: "Can't sell it, don't use it for training, don't change it, and tell everyone I wrote it." Doesn't that seem a bit vain for an open source project? I might relax the license a bit by dropping the NoDerivs clause, but I'm still mulling it over.