On 10/25/2016 1:50 AM, Isabel Drost-Fromm wrote: > Longer version: Every now and then I hear people complain either > privately or publicly [1] that people working on Apache projects who > are not paid to do that work and have don't have the luxury to > participate full-time are facing a hard time getting into our > communities.
I'm a committer on the Lucene-Solr project, working primarily on the Solr part. I've had this role for about 3.5 years. I am not a member of the PMC. The committer invitation came completely out of the blue. Before that, I had contributed a few patches via Jira, and some of them had even been committed, but my biggest participation is being active on the Solr mailing list and IRC channel. I maintain Solr installations as part of my job, but nobody has ever paid me for the work I do on the project, and my employer has never made any demands of me in my role as committer. I definitely cannot work on Solr full-time. I enjoy participating, and I like to think that I'm part of a good open source community. I think I can safely say that our project has several people who are not paid for their project work, and do not have significant spare time to work on the project. There are also a number of committers who DO have jobs where I believe they are effectively paid to improve the project, even if it's not a full job description. It's hard to say whether those relationships represent conflicts of interest regarding the health of the project. My cautious point of view is that there's no *immediate* cause for concern with Lucene. At least one of our committers knows almost nothing about Java, which is significant because Lucene-Solr is a Java codebase. That person obtained the role because of a strong willingness to help in other areas -- they are active on the mailing lists, and they almost single-handedly contributed a vastly superior Solr web interface before being invited as a committer, using html, css, and javascript. I'm not sure which Apache projects might fit the description you have provided. I am subscribed to a few other Apache project mailing lists, for other Java technologies that Solr includes as dependencies. Aside from being far less active than the Solr community, those also appear to work properly in the Apache Way like (IMHO) Lucene-Solr does. Even if there are projects that work the way you have described, I'm reluctant to endorse having the foundation "help" (read: interfere) with their operation unless the project or its community specifically requests it. That should be reserved for projects that are completely broken, not projects that have a few internal issues to work out. If a particular community feels that they have issues, I think it's mostly up to that community (the PMC in particular) to make that determination and deal with the problem. All that said... there's likely room for improvement in some projects/communities, even some that you'd say are healthy. Thanks, Shawn --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@community.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@community.apache.org
