Thanks for responding, everyone. There’s one really important point I’d like to make about incubation (and Apache in general) that many people find counter-intuitive. There are 3 basic things to work on: (a) the code, (b) the incubation tasks (e.g. trademark search), and (c) the community.
By far the most important thing is the community. Apache folks often cite the mantra “community over code”; this means that if you build a healthy community, the code will look after itself. Consider one of the most important “tasks” of incubation, namely producing releases. The contributors often focus on the code, giving themselves a very high bar in terms of the number of features to implement and bugs to fix before producing a release. But it’s much better to just get a release out there, warts and all. The process of producing the release (testing it, writing the doc, promoting it) pulls the community together. People will discover those “warts”, contribute fixes, and you will have your first new committers. The first incubator release always takes WAY longer than you expect, and not for the reason you expect. It takes a lot of effort to assemble the release into an acceptable format, checking the licenses of dependencies, including the necessary LICENSE and NOTICE files, and so forth. I recommend that you start work on the first release very soon, and resist the temptation to put lots of features into it. If you want to build community (i.e. attract people who don’t work for IBM or live in Zurich) promotion is essential. An active twitter account, blog posts, and talks at conferences or meet ups where your potential users are in attendance. (For example, DataWorks Summit Berlin[1] is in April and CFP ends in one week. A lot of attendees would be interested in Crail, even at this early stage.) As for tasks, they are listed on the status page [2]. We can burn them down and update the page over the next couple of months. Julian [1] https://dataworkssummit.com/berlin-2018/ <https://dataworkssummit.com/berlin-2018/> [2] http://incubator.apache.org/projects/crail.html <http://incubator.apache.org/projects/crail.html> > On Dec 6, 2017, at 7:19 AM, bernard metzler <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi all, > > I'm Bernard Metzler from IBM Zurich Research Lab. For quite some > years now, my main interests are in design, implementation and > deployment of flexible and highly efficient I/O stacks. I worked > on specification and implementation of protocols and programming > interfaces for Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) and non-volatile > memory integration. I am representing IBM at the Board of the > Open Fabrics Alliance. My contributions to the open source community > include a communication subsystem for non-volatile memory > integration with the BlueGene supercomputer, and a software > only RDMA driver for Linux, which aims at enabling RDMA > applications at any host system w/o dedicated RDMA hardware. > I am in the process of submitting this driver to Linux upstream. > Ultimate goal is to enable RDMA applications (like Crail!) within > any cloud environment. > I worked in the context of several international research projects, > including the Human Brain Project, and the Square Kilometer Array > Project. > I am involved with Crail from it's very beginning, so far mainly > contributing to the design discussion. It is my first Apache project. > > Cheers, > Bernard.
