Thank you for sending this. I am not going to reply in depth now, but will do
so to Kelly and
others over the weekend, but this is *precisely* the reason that I have been so
emphatic
about trying to get the PMC to see the road they have already gone done and the
ship that
has already set sail.
Those not familiar with Lucene and its vote to merge Lucene/Solr may want to
Google the
Apache archives around 2010 and see some of the effects of Individual
organizations and
vendors driving supposedly vendor neutral Apache projects. It’s not even
conjecture at this
point in Cassandra. The Board has acted as Greg referred to else-thread, and we
asked Jonathan & the
PMC to find a new chair (rotation is healthy yes, but we also need the chair to
be the eyes
and ears of the Board and we asked for a change there). Mark Thomas from the
Apache Board
also has a set of actions that he is working with the PMC having to do with
trademarks and
other items to move towards more independent governance.
Your experience that you cite below Lukasz is precisely one I found in
Lucene/Solr, Hadoop,
Maven, and other projects. Sometimes the ship has been righted – for example in
all of these
projects they have moved towards much more independent governance, welcoming to
contributors,
and shared community for the project. However, in other cases (see IBATIS), it
didn’t work out, for
various reasons including community issues, but also misunderstandings as to
the way that the
ASF works. I know my own experience of being an unpaid, occasional contributor
to some open
source projects has put me to a disadvantage even in some ASF projects driven
by a single vendor.
I’ve also been paid to work on open source (at the ASF and elsewhere) and in
doing so, been on the
other side of the code. That’s why ASF projects and my own work in particular I
strive to try and
remain neutral and to address these types of issues by being welcoming, lower
the bar to committership
and PMC, and moving “contributors” to having a vote/shared governance of the
project at the ASF.
Thanks for sending this email and your insights are welcome below. The Apache
Board should hear this
too so I am CC’ing them.
Cheers,
Chris
On 11/4/16, 5:03 PM, "Łukasz Dywicki" <l...@code-house.org> wrote:
Good evening,
I feel myself a bit called to table by both Kelly and Chris. Thing is I
don’t know personally nor have any relationship with both of you. I’m not even
ASF member. My tweet was simply reaction for Kelly complaints about ASF
punishing out DataStax. Kelly timeline also contained statement such "forming a
long term strategy to grow diversity around” which reminded me my attempts to
collaborate on Cassandra and Tinkerpop projects to grow such diversity. I
collected message links and quotes and put it into gist who could be read by
anyone:
https://gist.github.com/splatch/aebe4ad4d127922642bee0dc9a8b1ec1
I don’t want to bring now these topics back and disscuss technical stuff
over again. It happened to me in the past to refuse (or vote against) some
change proposals in other Apache projects I am involved. I was on the other
("bad guy") side multiple times. I simply collected public records of
interactions with DataStax staff I was aware, simply because of my personal
involvement. It shown how some ideas, yet cassandra mailing list don’t have
many of these coming from externals, are getting put a side with very little or
even lack of will to pull in others people work in. This is blocking point for
anyone coming from external sides to get involved into project and help it
growing. If someone changes requires moves in project core or it’s public APIs
that person will require support from project members to get this done. If such
help will not be given it any outside change will be ever completed and noone
will invest time in doing something more than fixing typos or common programmer
errors which we all do from time to time. Despite of impersonal nature of
communications in Internet we still do have human interactions and we all have
just one chance to make first impression. If we made it wrong at beginning its
hard to fix it later on.
Some decisions made in past by project PMCs lead to situation that project
was forked and maintained outside ASF (ie. stratio cassandra which eventually
ended up as lucene indexes plugin over a year ago), some other did hurt users
running cassandra for long time (ie. discontinuation of thrift). Especially
second decission was seen by outsiders, who do not desire billion writes per
second, as marketing driven. This led to people looking and finding
alternatives using compatible interface which might be, ironically, even faster
(ie. scylladb).
And since there was quote battle on twitter between Jim Jagielski and
Benedict, I can throw some in as well. Over conferences I attended and even
during consultancy services I got, I’ve spoken with some people having records
of DataStax in their resumes and even them told me "collaboration with them
[cassandra team] was hard". Now imagine how outsider will get any chance to get
any change done with such attitude shown even to own colleagues? Must also note
that Tinkerpop is getting better on this field since it has much more generic
nature.
I don’t think this whole topic is to say that you (meaning DataStax) made
wrong job, or you are doing wrong for project but about letting others join
forces with you to make Cassandra even better. Maybe there is not a lot of
people currently walking around but once you will welcome and help them working
with you on code base you may be sure that others will join making your
development efforts easier and shared across community.
Kind regards,
Lukasz
> Wiadomość napisana przez Edward Capriolo <edlinuxg...@gmail.com> w dniu 4
lis 2016, o godz. 18:55:
>
> On Thu, Nov 3, 2016 at 11:44 PM, Kelly Sommers <kell.somm...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> I think the community needs some clarification about what's going on.
>> There's a really concerning shift going on and the story about why is
>> really blurry. I've heard all kinds of wild claims about what's going on.
>>
>> I've heard people say the ASF is pushing DataStax out because they don't
>> like how much control they have over Cassandra. I've heard other people
say
>> DataStax and the ASF aren't getting along. I've heard one person who has
>> pull with a friend in the ASF complained about a feature not getting
>> considered (who also didn't go down the correct path of proposing) kicked
>> and screamed and started the ball rolling for control change.
>>
>> I don't know what's going on, and I doubt the truth is in any of those,
the
>> truth is probably somewhere in between. As a former Cassandra MVP and
>> builder of some of the larger Cassandra clusters in the last 3 years I'm
>> concerned.
>>
>> I've been really happy with Jonathan and DataStax's role in the Cassandra
>> community. I think they have done a great job at investing time and money
>> towards the good interest in the project. I think it is unavoidable a
>> single company bootstraps large projects like this into popularity. It's
>> those companies investments who give the ability to grow diversity in
later
>> stages. The committer list in my opinion is the most diverse its ever
been,
>> hasn't it? Apple is a big player now.
>>
>> I don't think reducing DataStax's role for the sake of diversity is
smart.
>> You grow diversity by opening up new opportunities for others. Grow the
>> committer list perhaps. Mentor new people to join that list. You don't
kick
>> someone to the curb and hope things improve. You add.
>>
>> I may be way off on what I'm seeing but there's not much to go by but
>> gossip (ahaha :P) and some ASF meeting notes and DataStax blog posts.
>>
>> August 17th 2016 ASF changed the Apache Cassandra chair
>> https://www.apache.org/foundation/records/minutes/
>> 2016/board_minutes_2016_08_17.txt
>>
>> "The Board expressed continuing concern that the PMC was not acting
>> independently and that one company had undue influence over the project."
>>
>> August 19th 2016 Jonothan Ellis steps down as chair
>> http://www.datastax.com/2016/08/a-look-back-a-look-forward
>>
>> November 2nd 2016 DataStax moves committers to DSE from Cassandra.
>> http://www.datastax.com/2016/11/serving-customers-serving-the-community
>>
>> I'm really concerned if indeed the ASF is trying to change control and
>> diversity of organizations by reducing DataStax's role. As I said
earlier,
>> I've been really happy at the direction DataStax and Jonathan has taken
the
>> project and I would much prefer see additional opportunities along side
>> theirs grow instead of subtracting. The ultimate question that's really
>> important is whether DataStax and Jonathan have been steering the project
>> in the right direction. If the answer is yes, then is there really
anything
>> broken? Only if the answer is no should change happen, in my opinion.
>>
>> Can someone at the ASF please clarify what is going on? The ASF meeting
>> notes are very concerning.
>>
>> Thank you for listening,
>> Kelly Sommers
>>
>
> Kelly,
>
> Thank you for taking the time to mention this. I want to react to this
> statement:
>
> "I've heard people say the ASF is pushing DataStax out because they don't
> like how much control they have over Cassandra. I've heard other people
say
> DataStax and the ASF aren't getting along. I've heard one person who has
> pull with a friend in the ASF complained about a feature not getting
> considered (who also didn't go down the correct path of proposing) kicked
> and screamed and started the ball rolling for control change."
>
> There is an important saying in the ASF:
> https://community.apache.org/newbiefaq.html
>
> - If it didn't happen on a mailing list, it didn't happen.
>
> It is natural that communication happens outside of Jira. The rough aim of
> this mandate is a conversation like that that happens by the water cooler
> should be summarized and moved into a forum where it can be recorded and
> discussed. There is a danger in repeating something anecdotal or 'things
> you have heard'. If that party is being suppressed, that is an issue to
> deal with. If a party is unwilling to speak for themselves publicly in the
> ASF public forums that is on them. Retelling what others told us is
> 'gossip' as you put it.
>
> "I think it is unavoidable a single company bootstraps large projects like
> this into popularity"
> "I don't think reducing DataStax's role for the sake of diversity is
> smart."
>
> Let me state my opinion as an open source ASF member that was never
> directly payed to work on an open source project. I have proposed and seen
> proposed by others ideas to several open source projects inside (ASF and
> outside) which were rejected. Later (months maybe years later) the exact
> idea or roughly the same idea is implemented by different person in a
> slightly different form. There is a lot of grey area there.
>
> How does that related to this http://www.datastax.com/2016/
> 11/serving-customers-serving-the-community ?
>
> Remember the ASF is a volunteer organization. One desired effect of the
> volunteerism is so that one single large company does not bootstrap or
> control the project. (When my proposed ideas got knocked down, I had some
> choices including complain to anyone that will listen, lick my wounds and
> press on, or become less involved.)
>
> Whatever event has happened has happened. Like you, I only know of it
> second hand so I will not comment.
>
> The volunteer committers can decide their own level of involvement. For
> example, they can "double down" and use their free time to stay
> involved. They can attempt to convince their organization that pulling
them
> back is the wrong move, or they can fall away.
>
> " The ultimate question that's really important is whether DataStax and
> Jonathan have been steering the project in the right direction"
>
> Outside of the politics/litigation it is becoming normal for an ASF
project
> to rotate the PMC chair. It keeps things fresh, and helps avoid issues
> where some may perceive control by one person/entity. Your question may
> ultimately highlight an issue as ASF sees it, namely who is "steering" you
> mention a corporate entity in your question.
