On 27 May 2012 01:15, Ralph Goers <ralph.go...@dslextreme.com> wrote:
> What would happen if all the Cloudera people were to suddenly vanish from > the project (this could easily happen if Cloudera were purchased by a > larger company who had different goals). As it stands today I don't > believe the project would survive very long. > > That happened to axis 1.x when the IBM developers all got reassigned to Websphere stuff, a large chunk of the knowledge of the dev team vanished one day. That knowledge was missed more than the engineering support -the whole undercommented bit of the WSDL-to-Java-source metacode was the bit that was hardest for the successors to understand Sanjeeva and the WSO2 team took up the mantle, and with a focus on Axis made it much much better -showing that heavy (but not not sole) engagement from a small startup can benefit a project. Cloudera's biz plan does depend on a core OSS Hadoop, so it's less likely they will disappear than a team from some F100 corporation that can reassign or terminate whole organisations based on a single email. I'd put the risk more on "in whose interests do decisions get made", rather than the "they all disappear one day" scenario. Even so, I hope the knowledge of the codebase is spread more widely than just across those who check stuff in.
