Pre-text: This conversation started among several members of the ASF, you are seeing this message here, as it was suggested to have the discussion on a public mailing list so everyone can participate.
Hi, tl;dr: I'm tired of hearing Apache is "where large firms dump code (to break the market for other or to avoid looking bad for abandoning it", I'm also tired of hearing that Apache is where projects are controlled by corporate interests under the disguise of some Apache Way process. I would like to figure out whether this is actually true based on numbers instead of subjective perceptions. If it is true I would like to figure out if and how we need to fix this. Longer version: Every now and then I hear people complain either privately or publicly [1] that people working on Apache projects who are not paid to do that work and have don't have the luxury to participate full-time are facing a hard time getting into our communities. Similarly every now and then we see projects running into trademark issues, conflicts of interest with their employers, trouble with wearing too many hats [2,3] (though everytime I hear about wearing more than one hat I have to think of the following lightning talk [4]). I don't think handwavery statements will get us very far. Maybe it makes sense to think about the following first: - If projects are making progress (getting new releases out, getting new features implemented, getting bugs and security vulnerabilities addressed), do we care about how they are governed? Why do we care if we do? About which aspects do we care? - Given the influx of projects into the incubator (and the number of projects making it through) people seem to trust the ASF as a home for their communities. What kind of value does that have for us? What is the value we are giving back to these projects? Maybe from there we can come up with stories and metrics that hold (or should hold) for all of our projects. Let me provide an example for illustration: In many previous conversations and talks I stressed that Apache is about communities, that being part of an Apache project doesn't necessarily mean that the particular human has to contribute large amounts of code - in the case of Mahout at some point we even had to communicate that the best way to not be accepted as a GSoC student would be to propose to implement yet another machine learning algorithm as that would probably not what the project needed most, nor would it be feasable given the time frame. Based on that my answer to "do we care about how projects are governed" would be "yeah, sure we do - our system is based on merit, merit comes from valuable contributions". The metric I'd setup to test that hypothesis is true would be to cross-check number of contributions (patches, documentation fixes and the like) with whether the people making these contributions are actually being promoted to committer. Makes sense? Anyone interested in this? Anyone interested in helping get sensible numbers up - my JIRA magic is seriously lacking... Isabel [1] http://apache-spark-developers-list.1001551.n3.nabble.com/Spark-Improvement-Proposals-tt19268.html#none [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0DpP25QCfQ&list=PL055Epbe6d5YSf1gQ-KL68xI9QsE70oIZ&index=13 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26T-UKAs1Fk&list=PL055Epbe6d5YSf1gQ-KL68xI9QsE70oIZ&index=11 [4] https://www.flickr.com/photos/carlossg/4081471635 [5] https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/76610c48321397e7af8e2e433ac73e6e1da4aa1a80b1fac67e7ed8c2@%3Cboard.apache.org%3E -- Sorry for any typos: Mail was typed in vim, written in mutt, via ssh (most likely involving some kind of mobile connection only.) --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@community.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@community.apache.org
