Hi Jean-Louis, Thanks for the feedback and thanks for all your contributions the past few months!
Speaking for myself, the main thing is I just need to pay more attention to Github PRs and make time for reviews. I go through periods of time where I am pretty busy with other things as I no longer am dedicated full time to ActiveMQ like I once was, but I can still find more time to help out to keep things moving forward. Sometimes I am working on something else entirely for a month (like Kafka) and I barely check github for a couple weeks which is obviously not ideal :) One thing I will be looking at for sure is https://github.com/apache/activemq/pull/1616 now that it was split out because that would be a good bug to get fixed. Chris On Mon, Jan 19, 2026 at 11:13 AM Jean-Louis Monteiro < [email protected]> wrote: > Hi team, > > I wanted to share some feedback based on my recent experience contributing > to ActiveMQ, in the hope that it can help improve the contributor > experience going forward. > > I’ve been contributing to Apache projects for nearly 20 years and am > currently a committer and PMC member on several of them. ActiveMQ is a > technically interesting project, which is why I was motivated to spend time > contributing. > > Slack discussions have been responsive and helpful, which is great. On the > mailing list and PR side, however, progress has been harder. Over the last > two months, several emails and PRs received limited feedback, and with > around 90+ open PRs (many stalled), slow feedback loops and CI instability > can make it difficult for contributors to stay engaged and productive. At > Apache, development discussions and decisions must happen on mailing lists. > There was a reminder recently sent from the board. > > I want to explicitly thank Jean-Baptiste for his involvement. His reviews, > merges, and willingness to answer questions made a real difference, and > clearly show how impactful timely feedback can be. > > In other projects, I’ve seen good results with a simple principle: if a > contribution doesn’t break the build and moves the project forward, merge > it. The committer who merges assumes responsibility for follow-up fixes or > refinements if needed. This keeps momentum, reduces PR backlog, and helps > contributors improve over time. > > I very much want to continue contributing to ActiveMQ. I enjoy the work, I > find the project valuable, and my role allows me to dedicate time to Open > Source. If there are ideas, expectations, or process changes that could > help improve contribution flow and feedback, I’d be very happy to > participate in that discussion. > > Thanks, > -- > Jean-Louis Monteiro > http://twitter.com/jlouismonteiro > http://www.tomitribe.com >
