Hi, As a newbie, I've generally quietly watched from the sidelines, but now I'm jumping in.
+1 about "expectations" vs "rights". In fact, it occurred to me that a booklet or pamphlet more like the "What to expect whenŠ" book would be better. IMO, correctly set expectations make for happier people. Here is my draft of "What to expect when you enter the Apache Incubator". 1) Apache is staffed by volunteers, and a few paid, but overworked IT folks known as Infra. As such, there is a very good chance that you will get different answers from different respondents, and responses may be delayed. This is not like your paid corporate job where there is administration and infrastructure whose mind-share is fully dedicated to serving you. 2) Apache has been around long enough and is large enough to have its own culture, with its own societal rules and tribal history. Lots of it is written down, but it is hard to find. Try to remember the last time you started at a new company or team or club and how, even though there were documents to read, there was always important stuff that you had to learn some other way. Apache is no different, but with volunteers, even less is written down, and people's recollections of history can vary widely and nobody is paid to serve your needs except Infra which is overloaded. 3) Some folks are quiet, some are noisy, some complain, some are optimistic. If you've worked on a large team, you've probably found this to be true on that team as well. Success usually comes from finding out which folks you deal with are of which personality type, and how best to work with those people. 4) Often you just have to be patient. Pick your battles. Prioritize your needs. Ask politely once for really important things, then plead again a few days later. 5) Learn how to use an internet search engine. Try to find information before you ask. The results may be hard to understand or confusing and be careful about reading snippets without taking in some of the larger context. But then your question will be better defined. Bonus if you can quote a web page as part of your question. 6) Some folks want there to be a "bill of rights", but you don't have any "rights" because there are no authority figures at Apache to enforce those rights. Any "violations" have to be dealt with "socially". You can seek help from the IPMC or even the board, but even they are volunteers and will try to address the problem socially as well. You can expect and demand respectful discourse, but sometimes tempers will boil over. That happens in many workplaces, homes and other gatherings of people. Expect it here as well, even more so sometimes, as there are relatively few face-to-face encounters to encourage civility and limit chances of mis-interpretation. 7) Your mentors may get too busy to follow the details of activity in your podling. Use the [MENTOR] tag in the subject to try to catch their attention. Escalate to the Incubator IPMC if they still don't have time to respond. 8) Embrace diversity. Every podling is a little bit different and your new podling may not exactly match up against existing documentation or prior history. Ask for guidance, keep in mind that answers may vary, and make your decision keeping these things in mind. A) The primary goal is to cover your and Apache's butt legally. This may require you to change build scripts and release packages in a way that is painful for you and your customers. B) Apache only officially releases source code. This may be a pain point for any existing customers used to downloading binary packages. C) At Apache, open source isn't just about making released source code available. It is about trying to get the community involved early and often before the source code is "release-ready". 9) Expect the unexpected. Sometimes, a document you find may be out-of-date, and/or mention things that don't apply to you and when you ask about it, you'll get a totally surprising answer. 10) Expect a ton of email. The temptation will be to unsubscribe from some of the lists you are told to subscribe to, but it is important to learn how to filter out stuff and skim other stuff as it helps you learn about the people and personalities you will be dealing with post-graduation on occasion, and if you end up on your project's PMC, you will be responsible for mining important information from that email stream. Now this may seem like it should make you run away screaming, but it all adds up to one thing: This is the "cost" of getting a group of volunteers to provide free software to a community of developers and users. You are doing a good deed by coming to Apache. You could just go to GitHub, but Apache provides some legal and logistical processes that should make your customers feel more secure that the code you want to work on will be available to the customer "forever" without fear that some individual can disappear and sink the whole ship, or some legal issue will arise later. -Alex --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
