On Aug 17, 2010, at 11:52 AM, Greg Stein wrote: > On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 13:46, Jan Lehnardt <[email protected]> wrote: >> On 17 Aug 2010, at 16:23, Andrus Adamchik wrote: >>> On Aug 17, 2010, at 4:32 PM, Sebastian Cohnen wrote: >>> >>>> Developers (no matter if commercial or not) are part of the community like >>>> everybody else, IMHO. >>> >>> Of course they are. This issue is about the concept of "hats". A commercial >>> developer working on an Apache project on a company time effectively wears >>> 2 hats - an individual and an employee. Apache is an org of individuals not >>> companies, so here we expect you to be with your "individual hat" on, e.g. >>> when making development decisions, writing a Board report and otherwise >>> interacting with the community. This is a fine line to walk to be sure, but >>> so far it worked out well for the majority of the projects. >> >> My (Apache hat) reasoning for okaying these entries was that we did mention >> other significant extra-project news in the past. The Canonical/Ubuntu >> adoption was big news, as was the publication of the O'Reilly book. I >> classified these two under the same umbrella. > > Yup. Both big items. We've seen plenty of book announcements, speech > acceptances, major deployments, etc in the reports. They *are* fair > game, and I don't think anybody is asking to avoid stuff like that. > > What struck me about this particular report was "$x is doing $y with > CouchDB" statements, and I think "great. but that is how they are > *using* CouchDB rather than what they are doing *for* the project." > There are lots of companies that monetize Apache projects. We *expect* > them to. But I'd prefer to see reporting on how those companies > directly contribute rather than their use. (yes, I recognize that a > company's success/use of our projects is a form of > advertising/support/help for our projects, but I take that as a given)
I think getting CouchDB into the Android marketplace is a huge accomplishment. It also isn't the sort of thing the Apache project is well set up to do on its own. So just doing this is giving back to the project in my book. As far as the hosting stuff, etc, we've been giving back to the open source community (but not into Apache CouchDB trunk) as generic build tools like this (used for hosting, etc) aren't really suited for core CouchDB anyway: http://github.com/jhs/build-couchdb The other stuff is nice because it drives adoption (which matters more than any amount of bugfixes etc -- who cares about a project no-one uses?) I agree it'd be nice to spotlight the individual community members in board reports. I also think some of this is just growing pains, as CouchDB is starting to become larger than the Apache CouchDB project itself can contain. Maybe it is better to ignore the extra-Apache activity in board reports. But I'd rather include it, because I'd rather have one strong CouchDB community (with activity both inside and outside the project) than try to draw a line between different aspects of the community. I understand that it is possible for some projects to become primarily commercially driven, with little given back to the community. At this point, I don't think CouchDB in anywhere near that, and I hope that in the long term, we never have that issue. Chris > > I'd be much happier to see a mention in the report that says "$x has > committed their $y platform port into the repository." That would be > exciting, and I'd certainly have no qualms about a company name in the > report :-) > > Cheers, > -g
