On 17 August 2016 at 03:47, Benedict Elliott Smith <bened...@apache.org> wrote:
> What this project really needs, and the board is chomping at the bit about, > is diversity. The fact is, right now DataStax does 95% of the substantive > development on the project, and so they make all the decisions. As such, > their internal community outweighs the Apache community. I will emphasise > clearly for my ex-colleagues, I'm not making any value judgement about > this, just clarifying the crux of the discussion that everyone seems to be > dancing around. > Thanks for that Benedict, it was well written and is an important issue. And straight off the bat I interpret it without any negative implications to DataStax. Of course it is going to be difficult with so many of the community are employees within one company. Back to the issue I've always been a big fan of how discussions were kept in JIRA, and always seen it as a significant addition to the Apache Way (specifically CS50 in the Maturity Model). But it seems the times have moved on and one specific "dev" mailing list is now being seen as under-utilised. http://community.apache.org/apache-way/apache-project- maturity-model.html#consensus-building There has been a number of tickets and decisions made along the way that could have come out (early) onto the dev ML. For example sometimes ideas/tickets come out appearing that they have already been rubber-stamped. If outsiders can't find that early discussion around ideas they can too easily presume the sinister, that DataStax is running the show behind the scenes. That's no good for DataStax and it's no good for the Cassandra. Personally I'm tired of having to defend both DataStax and the Cassandra community when it boils down to silly misunderstandings like this. Efforts like those numbered by Jeremiah would be greatly appreciated. It makes sense because if all we do is simply shuffling and duplicating information around between two persistent transparent searchable channels then we don't achieve much beyond breaking context and threads. When I read CS50 it's not about the dev ML being the Apache Way while discussions on tickets are not. It's that the community needs to identify all the really important decisions early on and: deciding that the dev ML is the 'project's main communications channel'; raise them there. Just generally increasing traffic to the dev ML is going to be a distraction to that goal. ~mck
