Hi all, There’s been some conversation and some acrimony kicked up by my recent blog post here <http://www.datastax.com/2016/11/serving-customers-serving-the-community>. I appreciate the conversation and regret the acrimony!
Fundamentally I was trying to convey two complementary messages: 1. DataStax wants to see Apache Cassandra thrive and will continue to contribute in multiple ways to make that happen, but at the same time 2. DataStax will be placing more emphasis on DSE and more engineering effort behind it. It’s unfortunate that the timing here coincides with some regrettable actions by the Apache Board of Directors, but this change in emphasis is primarily driven by business factors unrelated to the ASF. DataStax shares Apache’s commitment to community-led development independent of any single vendor. One friend pointed out to me that any vagueness can be interpreted as “weasel words” and turned into alarmist conjectures as to what this really means. I gave several specifics in the post as to how DataStax will continue to contribute to Apache Cassandra, but maybe I can simplify things: This has been going on for months. DataStax’s level of contribution moving forward will be nearly indistinguishable from our level in October and September. If that was no cause for alarm then, I hope it will not be cause for alarm now that we have articulated how we are moving forward. To be explicit: DataStax engineers will continue to contribute code reviews, bug fixes, and selected new features to Apache Cassandra. In a qualitative sense then, you could almost say that nothing has changed. On a personal note, I’d like to thank those in this weekend’s threads who have tried to de-escalate tensions rather than inflame them. Jeff Jirsa’s diplomacy stands out to me as particularly mature. As has been said before, we’re all on the same team here. Now let’s get back to making Apache Cassandra the best open source distributed database in the world! -- Jonathan Ellis co-founder, http://www.datastax.com @spyced
