Hi Russell and JB, I want to echo the appreciation for starting this discussion and for the thoughtful perspectives shared so far.
The Polaris community has been working incredibly hard to build an open source project that benefits the broader industry across many companies, countries, and individual contributors. Seeing more users and contributors from diverse backgrounds joining and collaborating is something we should all be proud of. Graduation itself is not the final goal. It is a natural outcome when a community consistently puts in the effort to build a solid, trustworthy, and useful open source product. To be honest, I have not closely tracked every metric throughout the journey, but from working closely with the project and the community, I strongly believe Polaris is more than ready to graduate. I am genuinely proud of what we have achieved so far. While the metrics are strong, what excites me even more is the expanding ecosystem and increasing adoption, much of which is not fully captured by numbers alone. For me, two golden standards of a successful open source project are a simple, maintainable code base and a great user experience. The community has invested a huge amount of time and energy to move in this direction, from binary releases to Helm charts, from CLI tools to the UI, and from constant bug fixing to refactors. These efforts are not accidental and reflect a deep commitment to quality. As the project grows, maintaining quality is never easy, but I am confident we can do so as long as we continue to work as one community. That means being willing to flag issues, propose solutions, encourage one another, and stay open minded while thinking from a community perspective. One thing I am particularly proud of is that people in the Polaris community are willing to do the right thing, even when it is the harder path, rather than taking shortcuts. I am also very happy that Polaris is a place where people can express their thoughts and ideas freely without unnecessary worry. That openness matters a lot. It keeps the community healthy and creates the conditions for long term innovation. Thanks again to everyone who has contributed to making Polaris what it is today. Best regards, Yufei On Sun, Jan 18, 2026 at 4:50 AM Jean-Baptiste Onofré <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Russell, > > Thanks for starting this discussion :) > > As an active mentor for the podling, I believe Polaris is very mature: > - Trademark management aligns with Apache project expectations. > - Dependencies and license checks are clean. > - The project has completed several releases; the most recent was largely > automated, well-documented, and showed great interaction with the ASF > infrastructure team. > > From a community standpoint, the vast majority of members are well-aligned > with the Apache Way, including meritocracy, peer-based collaborative > development, consensus-driven decision-making, and responsible oversight. > While we do face challenges with a few individuals, I view these as > isolated issues rather than a systemic community problem. I trust that with > continued mentoring, these individuals can improve. Many established > Top-Level Projects (TLPs) have navigated similar situations, and I don't > believe this should stall our graduation. > > The primary responsibility of the incubator is to guide podlings in > governing and growing their communities according to the Apache Way. In my > view, the podling has reached this milestone. > > Regarding the maturity of the project, I believe it is time to consider > graduation while simultaneously addressing the interpersonal frictions > mentioned. > > For reference, you can find the project health report here: > > https://github.com/apache/incubator/blob/master/tools/health/reports/Polaris.md > and you mentioned the maturity matrix in your email. > > Regards, > JB >
