Hello all, I mentioned in the Drill hangout last week that I had spoken with one of the original mentors for the Drill project (Isabel Drost-Fromm) and asked her advice about the future of Drill. To paraphrase what she told me:
1. There are two ways for open source projects to succeed. The first and riskier approach is with a single corporate sponsor. The obvious risks are that since the corporate sponsor is footing the bill, they will prioritize their own needs over and sometimes against community needs. (This is not unique to Drill). The slower but less risky approach is to build a community around a project, join forces and slowly drive it forward. She pointed out that some of the Apache foundation's longest running projects were run in this way. 2. We should focus our efforts on community building: She suggested a lot of what she described as "would be obvious in retrospect" such as making sure the documentation is really solid, and having a user experience in the beginning. She said we should use the resources of the Apache foundation to help publicize new releases etc. Also we should make it easy to become a committer. IMHO, I would add that we really should seek out additional code reviewers as we don't have enough and PRs take a long time to get approved. 3. Do a lot of what a vendor would do: Update the website and documentation to reflect things like: who is using Drill, who is offering professional support for Drill etc. 4. Define a mission: We should work to define a mission for Drill? IE Why does/should it exist and what business problem does it solve? IMHO it solves a very large one, but more people need to know about it. That's why I'm not giving up on it yet. @Isabel, I hope I captured the essence of what you were telling me here. Thanks everyone, --C
