On Tue, Jun 2, 2015 at 9:36 AM, Marko Rodriguez <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello Rob, > >> Not true, only PMC votes are considered legally binding from an ASF >> standpoint but the wider community is always welcome (and should be >> encouraged) to review and vote on a release. > > That is good to know. I sometimes feel like we lost the energy of our > "contributors" when we went TinkerPop went Apache. TinkerPop Contributors was > 20+ individuals from various companies and vendor products. Its good to hear > that doing the "side votes/recommendations" is considered a good thing. > Without the vendors saying "this release works for our product," the VOTE of > a PMC really doesn't matter in my opinion. >
So first, you want people voting on releases. More is better. Many projects watch the people consistently voting on releases as people to consider for becoming a committer or PMC member. Particularly when the people voting are doing a good job of testing, auditing, voting. That said, the last sentence in that paragraph bothers me. I am sure this is merely a subtle distinction, but I want to be very explicit. Vendors, and indeed any corporate entity have no standing at the ASF. Who you work for has zero bearing on the validity of arguments, and technical reasoning, and should have zero influence. Actually, MUST have zero influence. If a project is found to have undue influence from a commercial entity, that would be cause for concern. It would be cause for the Board to become involved to resolve the issue, or to remove the PMC members allowing that to happen. There are lots of essays on project independence at the ASF; but the bottom line is that the PMC is the only body that matters in the project. It must maintain its independence and not abdicate its responsibilities to vendors or any other group. If this project were a top level project, the vote email showing a delineation between vendors and non-vendors would draw a lot of ire and much closer oversight from the board until the issue was resolved. >> However please remember that Apache projects are supposed to be vendor >> neutral and vendor votes should not be treated any differently from votes >> by any other community member. People who work at vendors on products >> that use Tinkerpop are always welcome to vote as individual members of the >> community, the fact that they happen to work at vendors should not give >> their votes any special significance > > I understand that philosophy and I like it. I love how its all about the > individual at Apache. With that said, we do work closely with individuals at > vendor companies and their yay or nay is crucial given how much more they are > testing a TinkerPop release than, lets say, someone who is excited for > feature X in the next release. I guess the distinction is not "vendor vs. > consumer" but more "heavily tested vs. excited for a release." > So, it can't matter who a person works for here. And I think it's deleterious to efforts around building a community. You are explicitly in the above paragraph devaluing contributions from anyone who isn't employed by a graph database vendor. That type of attitude and conversation makes those folks feel less valuable, and thus care less about contributing to your project. We care about the actual work that people do, that is how you earn merit, and that is how you get a say (or binding vote) in a project. If you're successful in growing a vibrant project community it won't matter. You'll end up with users of your software who become as important, and who test as rigidly or more so than a vendor. You'll end up with users of your software who will morph into developers of your software. They will have corner cases in real life that will find things that vendors never considered; and their opinion must matter as much as someone who has a shiny $vendor.com email address. >> >> The general practise that I've seen used in other Apache projects is >> simply to report the total number of votes and state how many where >> binding in each category. So for your result you might have instead >> reported like so: >> >> +1 - 7 (4 binding) >> 0 - 0 >> -1 - 0 > Yes, please list the names of the folks placing 'binding' votes. That will help down the road when you or someone else goes back to audit. > What does "binding" mean? Isn't every VOTE binding? > > Thank you for your time Rob, > Marko. > > http://markorodriguez.com --David
