Hi Carin, Thanks for the question. Graduation is an important step for every ASF project that all incubating projects should be working towards. As others have said, it shows that the community is healthy, growing and following the Apache Way (public discussions, Apache-compliant releases, voting in new committers, etc.)
After graduation, the PMC is responsible for the project, e.g., it needs to check releases, vote on new committers / PMC members, ensure that the trademark of the project is correctly used, act on security issues, etc. While being in the incubator, the PPMC is learning all these things but eventually, the Incubator PMC is responsible. However, you are asking what are the *benefits* of graduating. I think there are at least the following three points: * The community becomes responsible for the project (see above). This is like the project coming of age. * Becoming a top-level project is an indicator for the health of the community and sustainability of the project. It shows that the project is passed the standards of the incubator. This can be relevant because often the health of the community is an important aspect when choosing an open source software to use, include in an other project or product, or to contribute to. Although often confused, graduation is no indicator for the quality/maturity of the code/software. * The ASF can issue a press statement when a project graduates. This can give the project some (short-term) exposure on the news and help to spread the word about the project and attract new users and contributors. Best, Fabian Am Fr., 18. Jan. 2019 um 16:37 Uhr schrieb Carin Meier <carinme...@gmail.com >: > Hi, > > I'm with the MXNet project which is currently in incubation. I had asked > some questions about incubation on our dev list > > https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/2499b18ab2c124db4765a2a2e72868f65363cd5ea08b2ec2d860e1ae@%3Cdev.mxnet.apache.org%3E > and got some great responses. > > Isabel Drost-Fromm encouraged us to share the last question here to get > some experiences from the other projects that have successfully gone > through incubation and graduated. > > Here is the question: > > *What are the benefits of graduation to the project itself and the end > users? * > > Thanks for any feedback. > > Best, > Carin Meier >
