Hi Hunter, A public fork is certainly an option under the Apache License. Many contributors maintain their own public forks on GitHub to enable them to contribute via a pull request on GitHub. While most contributors don't build and reproduce artifacts from their forks, they could do so, in theory.
If you're generating and redistributing artifacts, the one thing I would be very careful about is trademark infringement. Please bear in mind that the ASF owns the ZooKeeper trademarks, and careless redistribution under that name could lead to confusion in the marketplace, and can harm the ZooKeeper community. I'm not a lawyer, and you should seek your own legal advice, but I would take care to clarify that any modified artifacts that are redistributed are marked in a way that distances them from those produced by the ZooKeeper PMC within the ASF, so as to avoid trademark infringement and user confusion (e.g. by not calling your derivative work "ZooKeeper"). And, while I can't speak for the ZooKeeper PMC (I'm not on that PMC), from my perspective as an ASF member and committer on other projects, I think most projects at Apache would prefer to encourage contributions and engagement with their existing community, rather than see it fractured by independent groups operating apart from their community. There's nothing stopping you from creating your own, independent community, of course... but creating and growing communities is sort of what we do here at the ASF. So, contributing to the existing community is strongly encouraged. On Thu, Aug 13, 2020 at 8:11 PM Hunter Lee <hu...@linkedin.com.invalid> wrote: > > Hi ZooKeeper devs - > > I wanted to get an opinion on public, open-source forks of ZooKeeper. I am > aware that there are companies maintaining private or public forks of > ZooKeeper to deploy & develop their own flavor of ZooKeeper (or ZooKeeper + > alpha), like to have a public fork with our own potential use case-specific > features or bug fixes, etc. > > Is the ZooKeeper PMC generally okay with the idea? I wanted to see if there > were any guidelines or advice regarding having a public fork. > > The idea is to give us the flexibility to generate artifacts on modified > source code (instead of solely relying on official artifacts from Maven > Central) and give ourselves an opportunity to contribute back to upstream & > collaborate in the future. > > Thanks, > Hunter
