Hi Flink devs, Recently we had some discussion in the Flink PMC about creating a public open GitHub organization to host the code repo of some Flink ecosystem projects. Instead of the Flink PMC doing this, we found that it is more suitable for someone in the Flink community to do this on their personal behalf. So here I would love to see if people would be interested in coming together to help create and maintain this GitHub organization as a community effort.
*** Motivation* Currently, usually an ecosystem project is hosted in a company's GitHub repo. However, this does not always work well for those who want to collaborate on the projects.. 1. Some employers may have concerns if their employees contribute code to another company's repo. Instead, they would rather fork and develop in their own repo. This results in split efforts instead of joint force to develop the project. 2. Sometimes a company's policy disallows granting repo permissions to external contributors. 3. Sometimes a company does not have a GitHub repo and is also not willing to open source a project in a personal repo. Therefore a public open GitHub organization would provide a *neutral* place helpful to facilitate the sharing and collaboration on the Flink ecosystem projects for developers in these situations. *** How does it work?* 1. The public ecosystem GitHub org would be created and maintained by a few volunteers. 2. The volunteers who maintain the org are only responsible for creating and deleting the individual project code repositories upon the requests from the project owners. 3. When someone wants to put a Flink ecosystem project in this organization, a new GitHub repo will be created to host that project. 4. The owners of each individual project will maintain the code repo of that project, including merging PRs, granting commit permissions to other contributors, publishing releases, etc. *Note that this open GitHub org is NOT affiliated with ASF or the Apache Flink project, although the volunteers who maintain the org may be Flink committers or PMC members.* *** What's next* If people find the public GitHub org for the ecosystem projects useful, we will do the following: 1. Create the org together with the volunteers helping maintain the org. (PMC permission is required if the org name contains "Flink", which is likely). 2. Welcome people to put their projects in the org as they see fit. 3. Link the projects to flink-packages.org To give some additional context, the following questions were raised and answered in the earlier PMC discussion. *** Why not host the projects in Apache?* One suggestion brought up was asking the ecosystem project owners to contribute their projects to Apache, either to an existing project such as Apache Bahir, or through the incubator. The ASF is a great place to host organization neutral projects. However, being a part of an Apache project has a high standard and demands long term commitments. People also have to be committers, use jira, mailing lists. The projects might also have to go through incubation which is even more involved. Some of the ecosystem projects might not be ready to become a part of Apache in some cases. The project may still be in the starting stage and people don't know if it will last. Some of the projects may want more flexible coordination, etc. Therefore, an open GitHub organization would solve the issues mentioned in the motivation with the least restrictions. *** The relationship with flink-packages.org <http://flink-packages.org>* As people may already know that we have a flink-packages.org website listing the Flink ecosystem projects so users can easily find them. One reasonable question is how the new open GitHub org relates to the website. While flink-package.org aims to connect the project developers to the end users, the GitHub org focuses on helping with the collaboration between developers of the projects. The projects in the GitHub org will be linked to and listed on the website. Thanks, Jiangjie (Becket) Qin
