Happy to discuss this here but you're also invited to bring those points up at dev@training as other projects might have similar concerns.
The request for assistance still stands. If anyone here is interested in helping out reviewing and improving the material please reach out. On Sat, Jul 27, 2019 at 12:01 AM Sean Owen <sro...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, Jul 26, 2019 at 4:01 PM Lars Francke <lars.fran...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > I understand why it might be seen that way and we need to make sure to > point out that we have no intention of becoming "The official Apache Spark > training" because that's not our intention at all. > > Of course that's the intention; the problem is perception, and I think > that's a real problem no matter the intention. > Agreed. But that won't stop us from accepting or publishing content. If that were a dealbreaker then we could move the Training project to the Attic now. Along with Livy, Toree, Phoenix, Hivemall and probably dozens of other ASF projects which provide things on top of other ASF projects. Neither of those are endorsed as "The official X for Y". > > In this case, however, a company decided to donate their internal > material - they didn't create this from scratch for the Apache Training > project. > > We want to encourage contributions and just because someone else has > already created material shouldn't stop us from accepting this. > > This much doesn't seem like a compelling motive. Anyone can already > donate their materials to the public domain or publish under the ALv2. > The existence of an Apache project around it doesn't do anything... > except your point below maybe: > > > > Every company creates its own material as an asset to sell. There's very > little quality open-source material out there. > > (Except the example I already gave, among many others! There's a lot > of free content) > The way I read your point is that anyone can publish material (which includes source code) under the ALv2 outside of the ASF so why should they donate anything to the ASF? If that's what you meant why have Apache Spark or any other Apache project for that matter. But I don't think that's what you're trying to say. Hence I believe I must misunderstand and would ask you to rephrase/reiterate the point your point, please. > > We did some research around training and especially open-source training > before we started the initiative and there are some projects out there that > do this but all we found were silos with a relatively narrow focus and no > greater community. > > I think your premise is that people will _collaborate_ on training > materials if there's an ASF project around it. Maybe so but see below. > That's our hope, yes. Should we not do this because it _could_ fail? > > Regarding your "outlines" comment: No, this is the "final" material > (pending review of course). With "Training" we mean training in the sense > that Cloudera, Databricks et. al. sell as well where an instructor-led > course is being given using slides. These slides can, but don't have to > speak for themselves. We're fine with the requirement that an experienced > instructor needs to give this training. But this is just this content. > We're also happy to accept other forms of content that are meant for a > different way of consumption (self-serve). We don't intend to write > exhaustive or authoritative documentation for projects. > > Are we talking about the content attached at TRAINING-17? It doesn't > look nearly complete or comprehensive enough to endorse as Spark > training material, IMHO. Again compare to even Jacek's site and > content for an example of what I think that would look like. It's > orders of magnitude more complete. I speak for myself, but I would not > want to endorse that as Spark training with my Apache hat. > > I know the premise is, I think, these are _slides_ that trainers can > deliver, but by themselves there is not enough content for trainers to > know what to train. > No one wants to endorse anything as "official" anything. And yes: This material is not perfect but that's how open-source works, doesn't it? This is an initial patch which can be used to collaborate and improve upon. This is how Spark also works otherwise it'd have been perfect from version 0.1. Again: I agree Jacek's material is more complete and we could reach out to him (assuming he reads this anyway) but the fact is that this company did so first and I want to encourage contributions. All we're asking for here is help from the Spark community in making our content better hoping that someone is interested. If not we'll do the best we can ourselves. But this is where the experts are. > What is the need the solves -- is there really demand for 'open > source' training materials? my experience is that training is by > definition professional services, and has to be delivered by people as > a for-pay business, and they need to differentiate on the quality they > provide. It's just materially different from having open standard > software. > Yes, there is a demand and I disagree that it's materially different from having open standard software. I have not compared Jacek's material to the one in TRAINING-17 or to my own but I'm willing to bet that there are lots and lots of redundancies. The same concepts explained over and over in similar terms. What's the value in that? We - as a company - have created material and sold it for years but every time I give a training I see something that I should have updated and it's become impossible to keep up. I see the same outdated material from other organizations, we've talked to half a dozen or so training companies and they all have the same problem. To create quality training material you really need someone with deep insider knowledge, and those people are hard to come by. So we're trying to shift and collaborate on the material and then differentiate ourselves by the trainer itself. We'll see how that works out. Cheers, Lars
