hi folks,

I was very surprised today to learn that the Julia Arrow
implementation has continued operating more or less like an
independent open source project since the code donation last November:

https://github.com/JuliaData/Arrow.jl/commits/main

There may have been a misunderstanding about what was expected to
occur after the code donation, but it's problematic for a bunch of
reasons (IP lineage / governance / community development) to have work
happening on the implementation "outside the community".

In any case, what is done is done, so the Arrow PMC's position on this
would be roughly to regard the work as a hard fork of what's in Apache
Arrow, which given its development activity is more or less inactive
[1]. (I had actually thought the project was simply inactive after the
code donation)

The critical question now is, is there interest from Julia developers
in working "in the community", which is to say:

* Having development discussions on ASF channels (mailing list,
GitHub, JIRA), planning and communicating in the open
* Doing all development in ASF GitHub repositories

The answer to the question may be "no" (which is okay), but if that's
the case, I don't think we should be giving the impression that we
have an official Julia implementation that is developed and maintained
by the community (and so my argument would be unfortunately to drop
the donated code from the project).

If the answer is "yes", there needs to be a hard commitment to move
development to Apache channels and not look back. We would also need
to figure out what to do to document and synchronize the new IP that's
been created since the code donation.

Thanks,
Wes

[1]: https://github.com/apache/arrow/commits/master/julia/Arrow

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