Hi community, I'm calling for Ryan Blue to step down as Iceberg PMC chair. With the recent acquisition of Tabular by Databricks [1], I believe there is a natural conflict of interest for him to continue to be the chair of the Iceberg project.
Tabular's official messages will likely come and say something in the line of they will remain neutral, but in fact everyone knows that it is not possible when they have signed a contract with the company owning the competing project, and the contract has so much money involved. I have only contributed to Iceberg once, but I still see myself as a part of the community. I really like how Iceberg used to be, just a very well-designed table format. It started to change when Tabular was formed and started to do their REST catalog, but Tabular has been a small player in the industry that their control is in general not hurting the project. The startup also did many great things like py-iceberg after all, and I guess large companies also love the REST idea since they have the resource to build one, it's just not every company is Netflix or Apple. With Databricks, I am deeply worried about the direction of the project. I propose having someone from Apple (Russell, Anton, Yufei, Steven, Szehon), or Jack Ye from AWS to take the PMC chair position instead, as they are very active PMC members in the community, and have a much more neutral position to safely lead the project in the right direction. And also to other Iceberg PMC members and committers from Tabular, you have gained a lot of wealth from this, at this moment the best thing I hope you can do is please keep this project alone and out of your hands. [1] https://www.databricks.com/blog/databricks-tabular Thanks Natsukawa
