Hi everyone,
As many members of this list are aware, Continuent
(www.continuent.com) has maintained Sequoia and related projects for
some years now. We have made most of the recent changes in the
code. Current infrastructure like CVS, wiki pages, JIRA, email
lists, etc. are maintained on our hosts, which are currently hosted
in New York City at a location that offers very good network access
from both the US and Europe. We build and market commercial
software that is built on Sequoia, so this effort has benefited us at
the same time that it helped supply software to the open source
community.
As a number of you have no doubt noticed, we have been focussing more
on commercial products built on Sequoia and hence much less involved
on the open source side in the last few months. This has led to a
drop in activity on the code and, I think, made the project less
interesting to existing and new project members. There are fewer
members participating on the mailing lists and fewer bugs being
fixed. This concerns me and I hope other people because the Sequoia
project has been very popular in the past and the software serves a
useful purpose. It has been downloaded many tens of thousands of
times, which is not bad considering its specialized nature.
It would therefore be beneficial to have a discussion about how to
create a more vigorous community that serves the needs of everyone
who would like to use Sequoia. To start this discussion, I would
like to describe our own plans, some of which will directly impact
our involvement in Sequoia and its related projects.
1.) Product direction. We are actively working on a set of products
that will initially extend our current commercial uni/cluster
products but will eventually replace them. The Myosotis product
represents a part of that strategy. You'll notice it is licensed
under GPL. It is our intention to license the new products under
GPL using the MySQL model--you can use it for open source stuff but
if you want to get out of the GPL terms you buy a license. It's a
common business model that helps make house payments.
2.) Sequoia development. We plan to continue adding features and
bug fixes to Sequoia because they are required to fix our commercial
products. However, as we develop the new products it's very hard to
play the same role we have had previously, which was essentially to
do most of the development and open source support. In addition to
the question of resources, it's a matter of focus. You can't do
multiple things at once and do them right.
So at this point a couple of things could happen. One is that as
our support decreases someone could decide to fork the codeline and
create a version that is more attuned to the needs of open source
users. The code is licensed under Apache, so as long as you don't
change the license terms anyone can do this. However, an
alternative path, and I think a better one for everyone, would be to
figure out how to make the Sequoia project more community-oriented as
opposed to having it essentially owned by a single company,
Continuent. My model for this is the PostgreSQL project, which is
exceedingly active but owned by nobody.
I would like to toss out a few suggestions from the Continuent side.
We have made a number of improvements to the code, such as developing
a large suite of tests, that represent considerable extensions to the
current code that is released in open source. We would be open to
donating these over a period of time to the community so that it
would be possible for a group of interested persons (including us) to
maintain the code and move it forward in directions that benefit all
members. We also host the codelines and other infrastructure and
are happy to continue doing that indefinitely. Finally, for people
in Western Europe, we have a number of pieces of spare equipment,
mostly rack mountable Compaq hosts, that we would be willing to
donate to community members to help them step up to roles in
development, testing, and documentation of Sequoia. If you want to
sign up for work in the community and can get to Grenoble, they are
yours. (Limit two per customer, please.)
These are just a few of the ideas from our side. I would like to
know what other people think about these ideas and what we can do
together to move Sequoia forward. Please post your ideas to the
mailing list or feel free to contact me directly. At this point any
idea is fair game.
I look forward to hearing from everyone.
Thanks, Robert
Robert Hodges, CTO, Continuent, Inc.
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Mobile: +1-510-501-3728 Skype: hodgesrm
_______________________________________________
Sequoia mailing list
[email protected]
https://forge.continuent.org/mailman/listinfo/sequoia
