So Spark lists the committers and current company affiliations (but not historic) on its website.
On Wed, Aug 15, 2018 at 10:33 PM Abdul Rahman <abdulrahman...@outlook.com> wrote: > Are there examples of other larger Apache projects that have done this? I > am assuming this should happen rather frequently given the large number of > popular Apache projects (or just any other Open Source project) > > Get Outlook for Android<https://aka.ms/ghei36> > > ________________________________ > From: Wes McKinney <wesmck...@gmail.com> > Sent: Wednesday, August 15, 2018 4:18:24 PM > To: dev@arrow.apache.org > Subject: Increasing transparency of corporate support for Apache Arrow > development > > hi all, > > I have been spending both compensated (inside the bounds of 40 hour > work weeks) and uncompensated time (work beyond 40 hours per week) > working on Apache Arrow since the project started. In that time I have > changed corporate affiliations multiple times, and I have made career > decisions on the basis of obtaining ongoing support for Arrow > development. > > I think it could be a good idea to bring better transparency into > support that corporations are providing by allowing employees to > contribute to the Arrow project without having to spend uncompensated > time doing so. If individuals are contributing on their own time, that > is also useful information to have. > > In today's age of tenuous sustainability for large open source > projects, I think it is helpful to make a positive example of / > recognize companies that are investing time and money to allow > individuals to contribute to this project. Open source has a > significant "free loader" problem, and we are already starting to > occasionally experience free-loading behavior wherein individuals or > corporations treat this project as a source of free labor. > > Building a project like Apache Arrow is difficult, because, by > providing an open standard columnar memory format and a development > platform for doing many other things, we are enabling downstream > applications to solve problems in new and valuable ways. While such > users of Arrow may derive an economic benefit, it is difficult to > measure and even more difficult to judge how much to give back. As > time goes on, we will be increasingly reliant on proactive investment > and support in the maintenance and growth of this project, otherwise > in the long run we may be doomed to the "tragedy of the commons", and > no one wants that. > > Ultimately Apache projects are about individuals contributing to the > projects of their own free will, but we are frequently dependent on > financial support so that individuals can afford to contribute. > > Any thoughts about what we could do? I was thinking about having a > page on the Arrow website showing top individual contributors, top > "maintainers" (by # of patches merged; I wonder if it is possible to > scrape code review analytics), and top corporate sponsors by number of > supported patches. To implement the latter, we would need to depend on > data provided by contributors to state their affiliations and the > effective date of such affiliation so that it can be updated in the > "database". > > For example, I would have entries such as: > > - name: Wes McKinney > affiliation: [Cloudera] > effective_date: "2016-01-01" > - name: Wes McKinney > affiliation: [Two Sigma] > effective_date: "2016-08-26" > - name: Wes McKinney > affiliation: [Ursa Labs, RStudio] > effective_date: "2018-04-17" > > The analytics on the changelog could be implemented with a simple > Python script. Corporations could opt-out of having their > contributions attributed. > > Thanks, > Wes > -- Twitter: https://twitter.com/holdenkarau Books (Learning Spark, High Performance Spark, etc.): https://amzn.to/2MaRAG9 <https://amzn.to/2MaRAG9> YouTube Live Streams: https://www.youtube.com/user/holdenkarau
